WD Green+Raid, Blue+Raid Or Black

[Killedan9]

Hi there,
I am looking at completely upgrading my storage solutions for my desktop.
I do a lot of recording HD videos (1080p) and i am looking for a solution that will allow me to record well onto my HDD/HDDs.

I am currently looking at getting either:

4 x WD Green 2TB to go in raid 10 for $376
OR
4 x WD Blue 1TB to go in raid 10 $268

or should i just go for a single 4TB Black on its own for $335 (but i heard the black drives are very noisy)

Like i said i am mostly looking for performance that will allow me to record HD vids without problem but the amount of storage capacity and noise output would be a large factor. (I'd obviously need enough space to store a large amount of video data.)

Thanks for the help
-Dan

 

[darth pravus]

I think the black would give you highest performance at less noise than the others.

4 HDD's running together tends to kick out alot of irritating noise due to the way they resonate.

I have 2 caviar black and haven't found then noisy but even a loud single drive will be quieter than many driver. I think the green is a no go area as they tend to perform very poorly as anything other than storage space for films or documents.

 

[manofchalk]

If your going for a RAID solution, WD Reds would be the best option I think. They are optimized for a RAID and Server Rack environment, so they don't vibrate as much and can deal with RAID better.
Dont perform as well as Blacks as standalone drives, but just more optimized for what your after.
Or go for Seagate Barracuda's, equal to WD Blacks and often much cheaper.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840 1TB. $80
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148834 2TB $105
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148844 3TB $140
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178326 4TB $205

Another option is to get a large SSD (512GB or two 256GB's in RAID from the budget) and use that. Will perform better than the HDD's, no vibrations to deal with. Just got to move the video's off the drive to a HDD when your done so you don't accidentally max it out.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-148-527&ParentOnly=1

I'v run a computer with maxed out HDD bays (about 6 HDD's + an SSD), if you have a decent case with some form of padding on the mounting system then drive vibrations wont be an issue.

 

[darth pravus]

I would agree that reds are probably a good option but I have heard of lots of issues with the seagate driver.

Using bungee ties to suspend all of your HDD's stops vibration being translate into your case. It works very well for noise constrained environments.

 

[flank2]

hasn't wd permanently disabled tler in all their drives except the re & red series? thus making them a bad choice for raid?

EDIT
what I was thinking and what was typed were 2 different things, meant to say something like "thus making all wd drives besides re & red's a bad choice for raid"

 

[tokencode]

Reds are optimized for 24x7 runtime and RAID but not parking their heads as the Green drives did for power. This should not be an issue with the blacks like it was with the Greens. Blacks will be far faster the reds.

 

[Emerald]

As stated above TLER is disabled on Green, Blue, and Black drives which can lead to data lost especially in a Stripped environment like RAID0 or RAID10 since the controller might drop the drive out of the RAID.

WD Red are designed for small RAIDs up to 5 drives anything above that RE drives are recommended.

That being said I would suggest either get the Black single drive, which is fast and reliable, or build a RAID out of WD Reds

 

[popatim]

While you are discussing storage can I ask how you plan to back up all those recordings or is ok to lose it all if the drive dies? I'm only asking to get you thinking realistically about what you really need.

by the way - a 2TB drive holds about 1000hrs of raw HD recordings. My wife records quite a few shows which backs up to the windows home server I built with 8tb of storage. At one point she was 3 months behind, thankfully some soaps got cancelled. LOL
Yeah she would kill me if she lost 3 months worth of shows; hence the server which cost about 500 total. (back when drives were dirt cheap)

 

[Killedan9]

Im not extremely worried about backups as I already have a 4tb NAS for all my backups. Also ive looked into the RED drives and they only appear to come in sata 2, would this heavily affect my read/write speed? Would it force me to use them in raid 10 for recording HD. Otherwise i may just go with a single black drive.

 

[manofchalk]

Theres no difference between SATAII and III on a HDD, they are nowhere close to saturating SATAII's bandwidth.
Only exception is if the data being requested is already inside the HDD's cache, but that's fairly unlikely and will have no appreciable performance loss.

 

[popatim]

sata3's only real benefit to an hdd is NCQ which brings only slightly better performance. Sata2's will be more than fine.

edit - and nice job with the external drive! I like when people use a backup drive for backups! You get an 'Attaboy' and a pat on the back.

 

[tokencode]

If you are going to backup your data regularly to another device, you can go with the Blacks for RAID. This will be the fasted of the solutions mentioned. If you have a problem with the array you can simply reimage from your backup.