Most Reliable Backup- WD Red vs Purple vs Black vs Enterprise vs.. ?

[greatlakesguy]

Had a recent crash that was mostly backed up, but the small bit that wasn't was valuable (and newly added), so I'm really wary on reliabilty now. Knocked Toshiba off the list due to tough to RMA.

I don't care about the speed or the noise, just durability/lifespan/ruggedness/warranty.
I only need about 1tb, but I'll be keeping a backup of the backup also, uness advice differs.
Will have an easy life relative to their manufactured intent, I think.

The internal drives in the title seem tougher than the randomly colored external drives. So, wanting to buy an internal colored hdd or enterprise grade & case for weekly/monthly cumulative backups..and a backup for that backup...

So NAS drives are built with vibration resistance needed for a NAS system, but...
1. Assuming the slight vibration protection is NOT insurance against dropping a drive? (never have). Is the drive is overall more toughly built on the hardware or software side?

2. Why is the NAS drive warranty is 3yrs to the wd black's 5yrs, but the red seems built for tougher use.. i.e. NAS use & 2x load/unload cycle capacity? Neutralizing higher build quality and more straining field use?

Same for the purple "24/7 surveillance"- same warranty as red but 1/2 load capacity (same as black's).

3. So, will a drive intended for 24/7 use (purple) and/or above average vibration (red) be more reliable/last longer in settings with that not constantly present? (my environment)

4. Should I be more confident in the 5yr black warranty, 3yr 24/7 purple design intent or 3yr NAS designed drive? Or hey, throw the RE/gold line in for good measure

5. In the event a drive failed, the data recovery industry reps I've talked to seem to indicate >1tb is more costly to recover. Is it better to buy (2) 1tb's (duplicate content) or (1) 2tb in this situation?

Open to other options beyond WD for same quality, have looked thru a ton already.

 

[GhislainG]

Personally I prefer drives with a longer warranty, but you don't necessarily need a Black or Red to store backups unless they are powered on 24x7 (personally I wouldn't do that). I can't suggest a Purple drive as it's designed for storing video, not backups. If you have 2 backups of your data and you don't keep the drives in the same room, then the likelihood of having to get them recovered is minimized.

 

[faalin]

Is this work related or just home use? If your making backups of your computer on two different drives, at 40 - 50$ a drive im not sure why you would try to recover a drive if its backed up on another drive.

As for reliability i run a 6TB red pro drive for all my games just short of 2TB filled, had it for about 4 years now and cant remember the last time i shut my computer down.

 

[dullridge]

i prefer wd red generally

 

[greatlakesguy]

Personally I prefer drives with a longer warranty, but you don't necessarily need a Black or Red to store backups unless they are powered on 24x7 (personally I wouldn't do that). I can't suggest a Purple drive as it's designed for storing video, not backups. If you have 2 backups of your data and you don't keep the drives in the same room, then the likelihood of having to get them recovered is minimized.

Thanks for the responses. Yeah, eliminated purple as some of its video purpose features outweigh its 24/7 & vibration resistance abilities.

Could get away with a cheaper drive, but knowing recovery costs and having a drive in need of it, the risk isn't worth it to me.

#3 is big for me. My drives will NOT be used 24/7. So that would make them even more reliable than intended, in the long run, due to less use, right?
Less TBW, fewer head parks/head use at all

Lastly, it seems gold (enterpise) and red (nas) are designed for a RAID (not my plan)..
Read that data center drives (gold for sure)/drives in raid have a firmware difference vs consumer drives and don't try to recover data blocks that go bad like consumer drives do, which creates a much more unstable drive, run solo. Instead they rely on a raid controller to do this.

Is that true? Would using a nas/raid/datacenter be unreliable in non-raid setup?

 

[greatlakesguy]

Is this work related or just home use? If your making backups of your computer on two different drives, at 40 - 50$ a drive im not sure why you would try to recover a drive if its backed up on another drive.

As for reliability i run a 6TB red pro drive for all my games just short of 2TB filled, had it for about 4 years now and cant remember the last time i shut my computer down.

Pure home use. I'm preparing for worst case. As in two independent drives (or run in raid if red/gold demand that for reliability, see my question to GhislainG) with the same data, well within the warranty periods, simultaneously fail, taking my data with them. Which is about what happened when I only had 1 backup copy for my last drive.

So, which is most likely to NOT have that scenario occur?

I only have about 1tb off data to keep locally, my other 1/2 tb is in various cloud accounts. The stats tend to show that drives above 2 tb continually decrease in reliabiltiy, which is why I was avoiding that. I have very few games, so it's not a huge issue.

This is a laptop not a desktop, so I prefer to turn it off every evening.

 

[GhislainG]

Personally I prefer drives with a longer warranty, but you don't necessarily need a Black or Red to store backups unless they are powered on 24x7 (personally I wouldn't do that). I can't suggest a Purple drive as it's designed for storing video, not backups. If you have 2 backups of your data and you don't keep the drives in the same room, then the likelihood of having to get them recovered is minimized.

Thanks for the responses. Yeah, eliminated purple as some of its video purpose features outweigh its 24/7 & vibration resistance abilities.

Could get away with a cheaper drive, but knowing recovery costs and having a drive in need of it, the risk isn't worth it to me.

#3 is big for me. My drives will NOT be used 24/7. So that would make them even more reliable than intended, in the long run, due to less use, right?
Less TBW, fewer head parks/head use at all

Lastly, it seems gold (enterpise) and red (nas) are designed for a RAID (not my plan)..
Read that data center drives (gold for sure)/drives in raid have a firmware difference vs consumer drives and don't try to recover data blocks that go bad like consumer drives do, which creates a much more unstable drive, run solo. Instead they rely on a raid controller to do this.

Is that true? Would using a nas/raid/datacenter be unreliable in non-raid setup?

I use WD Blacks that are powered on 24x7 and there are no issues, but they are in well ventilated cases. I'm more worried about inexpensive drives that don't last for several years, but that's to be expected from drives having a 2 year warranty. Drives in an external case should not be powered on 24x7 unless the case provides adequate cooling.

Drives designed for RAID usually are reliable. My backup plan for important data is fairly simple: files are on a server that duplicates it to another server on a daily basis and then external backups are performed ona regular basis (different external drive for each server). I also backup my PCs to other external drives. The risk of losing imporant data is minimal.

 

[greatlakesguy]

Drives designed for RAID usually are reliable. My backup plan for important data is fairly simple: files are on a server that duplicates it to another server on a daily basis and then external backups are performed ona regular basis (different external drive for each server). I also backup my PCs to other external drives. The risk of losing imporant data is minimal.

Sounds like a safe plan. As far as raid, my question is whether or not a raid drive would be reliable if not used in raid setup, i.e. if they need a raid controller to maintain themselves, in which case I really have no other option if using that type of drive- as if I just had a single backup drive to copy to. I could probably set it up for raid but wondering if it's dangerous not to do so.

 

[GhislainG]

RAID drives work fine in a non-RAID environment; the only difference is that RAID drives support TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which you obviously don't care about in your environment. TLER is available only on WD Enterprise drives; Blue, Green, Red or Black don't have it. You probably shouldn't setup an enterprise RAID if you're not familiar with it.

Backup all your important data on 2 separate drives and the risk of losing data will be minimal, particularly if you store your backup drives in a secure environment (definitely not in the room where the PC is).

 

[greatlakesguy]

RAID drives work fine in a non-RAID environment; the only difference is that RAID drives support TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which you obviously don't care about in your environment. TLER is available only on WD Enterprise drives; Blue, Green, Red or Black don't have it. You probably shouldn't setup an enterprise RAID if you're not familiar with it.

Backup all your important data on 2 separate drives and the risk of losing data will be minimal, particularly if you store your backup drives in a secure environment (definitely not in the room where the PC is).

That's helpful, thanks. I've set up raid before but had no intent of doing so for a personal backup, unless of course it makes the drives operate much better, or not doing so is much worse.

So my last question is to narrow this down...
Sounds like I can eliminate red- thought it had better vibration protection/was built tougher, but warranty<black/enterprise.

So, for those... Warranty is the same, speed I don't care about, enterprise has 2x load/unload capacity- mostly a wash.

I read in different places on a WD forum that black might have a dual processor on the pcb vs 1 for the enterprise, that it has better scheduling than the enterprise, that its controller used different logic than the enterprise drive, making it better for random read/writes and lastly, that the enterprise drive might not have a piezoelectric motor which allows for finer movement of the read/write heads.

I can't speak for the veracity of any of that, aside from the controller being different in some way..and not many easy answers via google. Thoughts on those claims... or the toughness overall between black and gold or which is best suited for me?

By secure environment, you mean from the elements, theft or ..? Neither of the first 2 has threatened my backups before, though I tend to keep everything in different places in my bedroom.. I would think anywhere else in the house would be less secure..

 

[GhislainG]

I don't necessarily buy WD Blacks or Red for my external cases; less expensive desktop drives are fine since they are not used that many hours a week. Hard drives are not that sensitive; you only need to be somewhat careful when moving them around. For backup purposes, there are no differences between a Blue, a Red or a Black drive. Keeping all your drives in the same room is fine if you know that they'll never be stolen and a fire or a flood are impossible.

 

[greatlakesguy]

I don't necessarily buy WD Blacks or Red for my external cases; less expensive desktop drives are fine since they are not used that many hours a week. Hard drives are not that sensitive; you only need to be somewhat careful when moving them around. For backup purposes, there are no differences between a Blue, a Red or a Black drive. Keeping all your drives in the same room is fine if you know that they'll never be stolen and a fire or a flood are impossible.

You're right, I've been fortunate enough to avoid all those scenarios but I should give a copy to a friend.

funny you say the standard external drives will do...my thought after reading reviews for "my passport" and similar models was that since the warranty was 2-3 yrs shorter and the drives were overall not as tough as some of their internal colored equivalents, that something much tougher, like a black internal or enterprise internal for only 20-30% more or so (+ case) was a good choice, having in mind the cost of data recovery.

To me, the extra 2 yrs in warranty is worth it, if only because I have that much more faith that it will make it the same 3yrs the cheaper drive is advertised for (it's rumored to be the blue drive or another of the lower end ones inside many of the externals)
Basically want something built for a very demanding environment or built to last in general, but give it a very safe environment and hope that it does indeed last as long as it's supposed to.

So all the possibility of their differences existing, aside or considered (if it's true...) - if you were willing to pull the trigger on either black or gold, which one would you say is tougher or would last longer in a much less active, industrial or lower hour use environment than intended.

It's probably somewhat of a tossup, so I appreciate your input so far, because I thought it would be much tougher to distinguish between them.

 

[GhislainG]

The Gold features TLER for RAID. The Black doesn't. Get Black drives if it makes you feel more secure; personally I'd go with Blue drives because they get used once a week at most. I use Black drives in my systems because they are on 24x7; backup drives are not.