Greetings folks,
I've been meaning to upgrade my home desktop computer's storage space for about a year now. Unfortunately, just when I was about to grab a 2TB WD Caviar Black (always been very happy with these drives, got two of them humming in my rig as we speak), the Tsunami happened and the prices went insane.
Now, a year later the prices are finally back to normal, but to my surprise there's a new serious contender in the play - WD Caviar Red.
My trusty local retailer offers the 3TB model for nearly identical price as 2TB Caviar Black.
My system certainly is not a NAS - I use it as a pretty much standard home computer, and while it is online most of the time, I shut it down when I go to sleep every day. To my understanding however, Reds' only drawback when compared to Blacks seems to be high access times because of their low RPM. In other words, random R/W transfer rates aren't perfect and so working with many small files equals worse performance. I think I could live with that as I don't really need top notch performance from my storage drives anymore since I have purchased an SSD for that.
Is there anything I am missing? Any reasons why using a Red in a regular desktop system would be a bad idea? Their value for price seems incredibly high and on top of that they are silent and energy-efficient, and I'm yet to find "the catch".
Thanks for any help.
Best regards,
Thomas Ferry
I've been meaning to upgrade my home desktop computer's storage space for about a year now. Unfortunately, just when I was about to grab a 2TB WD Caviar Black (always been very happy with these drives, got two of them humming in my rig as we speak), the Tsunami happened and the prices went insane.
Now, a year later the prices are finally back to normal, but to my surprise there's a new serious contender in the play - WD Caviar Red.
My trusty local retailer offers the 3TB model for nearly identical price as 2TB Caviar Black.
My system certainly is not a NAS - I use it as a pretty much standard home computer, and while it is online most of the time, I shut it down when I go to sleep every day. To my understanding however, Reds' only drawback when compared to Blacks seems to be high access times because of their low RPM. In other words, random R/W transfer rates aren't perfect and so working with many small files equals worse performance. I think I could live with that as I don't really need top notch performance from my storage drives anymore since I have purchased an SSD for that.
Is there anything I am missing? Any reasons why using a Red in a regular desktop system would be a bad idea? Their value for price seems incredibly high and on top of that they are silent and energy-efficient, and I'm yet to find "the catch".
Thanks for any help.
Best regards,
Thomas Ferry