HDD : WD RED Series (NAS), or GREEN?

[Teran1982]

Can I benefit from the good mechanical and electrical conditions that these series offer? (I want safety and they say that these can give you up to 1.000.000 hours) The use will be in a normal computer (not in NAS) but as storage. Is it worth it? Or should I buy a usual desktop HDD, say green series? Will the RED series even work as a normal desktop disk? I don't plan to use it as system disk,but only for storage.

 

[wudai_e]

As far as I know, the REDs don't have the long spin up time the green has after the drive has been idle for a while. Don't know if that matters to you.

 

[Teran1982]

As far as I know, the REDs don't have the long spin up time the green has after the drive has been idle for a while. Don't know if that matters to you.

Thank you for this, it is interesting and good to know

 

[ronintexas]

I buy almost exclusively WD hard drives. Each has their purpose. Here is a quick breakdown among their drives:

Green - Eco friendly drives with design to be energy efficient and quiet. Designed to take advantage of non-use to lower power requirements.

Blue - The "standard" drive - reliability - great for desktop PC use.

Red - Most common use is for NAS - designed to be compatible with NAS enclosures, does not utilize any ECO friendly power reduction, as the drive was designed to run 24/7 in a network environment.

Black - This is the most reliable, highest performing drive in the series. For a consumer based drive, this is the best.

I use the black drives in my HTPC and main rig (Basically doubles as a file server, I have 4 - 2 for backup of other computers, 1 for backup of my computer, 1 for data on my computer). The wife's computer uses blue drives. I am not a big fan of the green drives, as the ECO friendly features can create read/write delays - although they are really good drives. The red drives are basically the blue drive with interface boards that are optimized for NAS and no ECO friendly features.

 

[everlost]

i use WD greens on my server , i have no trouble streaming, or moving data around. but there is only 3 of us. a Red drive is build/optimized for servers, Green for lower power consumption (i chose them because they run cool), and black for performance. the differences between them would be the use of command que, cache, and i think spindle RPMs (my greens run at 5400)

 

[nukemaster]

I am in a similar situation.

The main points of the Red drives are
-lower power
-less heat/noise.
-more raid friendly
-none of that head parking that makes the greens seem to lag after idle

Greens
-Cheaper
-Reviews seem to place the greens with better access times(the reds are tuned to stay more quiet.)
-If WDIDLE3 works, you can remove the head parking feature or at least reduce it to 5 minutes vs the standard 8 seconds.

You can find many reviews of the RED drives being used for data storage in desktop systems on sites that sell them.

I myself am looking at one for media storage(I have a back and while it is FASSSSSTTTTT it is louder then needed for storage alone).

I also have a WDC Blue for storage(2.5 inch), it works well, but 1tb is just not cutting it any more(and it idle parks and spins down, but it spins up faster then any desktop drive.).

And as always. Tom's Review.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/red-wd20efrx-wd30efrx-nas,3248.html

 

[Teran1982]

I buy almost exclusively WD hard drives. Each has their purpose. Here is a quick breakdown among their drives:

Green - Eco friendly drives with design to be energy efficient and quiet. Designed to take advantage of non-use to lower power requirements.

Blue - The "standard" drive - reliability - great for desktop PC use.

Red - Most common use is for NAS - designed to be compatible with NAS enclosures, does not utilize any ECO friendly power reduction, as the drive was designed to run 24/7 in a network environment.

Black - This is the most reliable, highest performing drive in the series. For a consumer based drive, this is the best.

I use the black drives in my HTPC and main rig (Basically doubles as a file server, I have 4 - 2 for backup of other computers, 1 for backup of my computer, 1 for data on my computer). The wife's computer uses blue drives. I am not a big fan of the green drives, as the ECO friendly features can create read/write delays - although they are really good drives. The red drives are basically the blue drive with interface boards that are optimized for NAS and no ECO friendly features.

That was also very helpful, thank you. I wold buy a black definitely but I am low on budget :/

 

[ronintexas]

The Blue/Green drives are priced (NewEgg) at $75, Red $79 and Black at $94 for the 1TB models. The Blue drives are great for use as a standard system drive. I have never used the red drives in any of my builds....but I don't typically utilize NAS enclosures.

You can't go wrong with a WD Drive, you will get consistent performance/reliability from all of these drives.

 

[Teran1982]

The Blue/Green drives are priced (NewEgg) at $75, Red $79 and Black at $94 for the 1TB models. The Blue drives are great for use as a standard system drive. I have never used the red drives in any of my builds....but I don't typically utilize NAS enclosures.

You can't go wrong with a WD Drive, you will get consistent performance/reliability from all of these drives.

Agreed. I also use only WD drives from the beginning of my builds. I like them too, but I live in Greece and here a Black is at 140Euros and Greens-Reds at about 110 Euros
That's about 180$ for the black!! OMG 🙁

 

[ronintexas]

Wow. We are spoiled in the US. What are the prices for the blue drives? The blue/green/red are almost all the same price (+/- 5% usually), but the black drives are about 20-30% higher.

 

[Teran1982]

Wow. We are spoiled in the US. What are the prices for the blue drives? The blue/green/red are almost all the same price (+/- 5% usually), but the black drives are about 20-30% higher.

Checkout this site and get a heart attack http://www.plaisio.gr/ypologistes-anavathmisi/anavathmisi-ypologisti/hdd-ssd-skliroi-diskoi.htm
That's our prices. Greece is a beautiful country with many stupid people you see.. :/
To buy an AMD FX8350 + ASUS Sabertooth v3 rev2 + Kingston memory dual channel 2x4GB 1600,there were stores that asked me 490Euros That is 638$ almost. It's outrageous! Imagine if I could buy from newegg for example, what could I have bought with 638$!!

 

[ronintexas]

That is too bad. Import/export taxes kill the consumer.

 

[Northwolfe]

Wow. We are spoiled in the US. What are the prices for the blue drives? The blue/green/red are almost all the same price (+/- 5% usually), but the black drives are about 20-30% higher.

Checkout this site and get a heart attack http://www.plaisio.gr/ypologistes-anavathmisi/anavathmisi-ypologisti/hdd-ssd-skliroi-diskoi.htm
That's our prices. Greece is a beautiful country with many stupid people you see.. :/
To buy an AMD FX8350 + ASUS Sabertooth v3 rev2 + Kingston memory dual channel 2x4GB 1600,there were stores that asked me 490Euros That is 638$ almost. It's outrageous! Imagine if I could buy from newegg for example, what could I have bought with 638$!!

You can always buy from Amazon.co.uk...Their prices are great, and always magnificent promotions.