Is a WD Blue 5400RPM Okay for Storage?

[GunXpatriot]

So I've been looking to upgrade my whole storage setup on the custom build I did about a year and a half ago. I have a WD Black 1TB that I split about 250GB for OS stuff, and the remaining space for media storage, documents, and so on...

Well, here I am a year and a half later, and that space is nearly gone. I have about 4GB left on the storage partition, and about 60GB left on the OS partition and I'm having to move things into the OS parition and things are getting disorganized.'

So I'm thinking of doing a ~500GB SSD for my OS, and to save some money, do the WD Blue 4TB as my mass storage. ALSO, so I have a backup of everything, I was looking to get a Synology box, not sure which one, probably the lower end one, to sync with all my stuff. I know when you order from Synlogy, they put WD Greens in, but from what I hear, they're garbage.

I was gonna buy 2 WD Blue 4TB's and put one in my computer and one in the Synology NAS to sync everything... Will I be crippled by the 5400RPM drive, moreso in my computer, because a slower NAS sync won't bother me much... I think having the SSD as my OS drive will be where I'm really gonna need the speed. And my WD Black is fast, but I'd rather spend half the money, even if I have to sacrifice about 33% of the speed. I dunno... What do you guys think?

 

[mrmez]

-WD Blue will be fine for general storage.
-You shouldn't need a 500Gb SSD (if you have a sufficient HDD).
-I've got a few Synology NAS bays, none of them ever came with a drive.

 

[koffeeshop77]

i wold get an ssd.
and then the blue and you really will not be able to tell a difference whatsoever unless you ran a hdd speed test those 5400 rpm drives are still very fast drives

 

[why_wolf]

yes blue is perfectly fine for mass storage, it's what I do. I currently have 500gb SSD and a 500gb blue in my rig and then a NAS with about 5ish Tb of storage.

I use the blue for my WIP and other than it taking a second or two for it to spin up when you haven't been using it for a bit there is no real slowness to it.

Personally I pay a little bit extra for the REDs for my NAS drives but I wouldn't expect that to make any difference other than longevity if you use some Blues instead for your NAS.

 

[GunXpatriot]

So perhaps I should go for the Red in the NAS, and the blue in my computer?

I believe the Reds have certain firmware features like writing protocols when a bad sector is detected and whatnot. I'm not an expert on them, but as far as I know, I think the idea is that they'll be quicker because they wont interrupt to try and find specific data or will remap it or something. Obviously they are geared towards NAS, but I guess my question would be, are those features necessary?

Still, the Reds are significantly cheaper than the blacks, so the upgrade from Blue to Red isn't so bad I guess.

 

[GunXpatriot]

-WD Blue will be fine for general storage.
-You shouldn't need a 500Gb SSD (if you have a sufficient HDD).
-I've got a few Synology NAS bays, none of them ever came with a drive.

Yeah, I think I wasn't specific enough. I meant when you buy the bays with drives included, I believe they ship with Greens. Although the higher end models may give something better, I'm not entirely sure.

Also, why not the SSD? I was kind of looking forward to the speed increase. Not that my machine is slow, but I guess it's more of a "just because" upgrade.

If anything, I was probably going to throw the 1TB Black in another build I'm looking to do. An HTPC type thing, or maybe just a secondary for a family member, since we're short on good, capable computers for the people in the house.

 

[mrmez]

No, DEFINITELY get an SSD. That should be 1st on the list.
But 500Gb may be quite a lot more than you need. 250Gb might be plenty. Depending on your needs, of course.

 

[GunXpatriot]

No, DEFINITELY get an SSD. That should be 1st on the list.
But 500Gb may be quite a lot more than you need. 250Gb might be plenty. Depending on your needs, of course.

Ah, I see what you meant. I'm only going for the 500GB because with my current partition of about 200+, I'm almost out of space, and after this overhaul, I don't plan any real upgrades for at least a few years. So I just want to future proof for that amount of time.