Question WD Red or Gold?

[ofir1939]

Trying to find reliable 3.5 drive, the more I research the more decisions. Less heat is always good, correct? Less vibration is also very good. Is there a WD that has both? And also reliable? I have two desktops, one has excellent cooling, the other not so much. Not so sure how to make more air flow, the case is very light aluminum, have to run with the side off. If I would get a Synology Raid case, and run it like a regular hard drive(s), is that do-able? Or practical? Never tried Nas Raid before.

 

[R_1]

depending on the price I would get the golds for only one reason.
red has a MTBF of a million hours, the golds have 2.5 times the MTBF 2.5 million hours Mean Time Between Failures.
the MTBF is an indicator of the quality of the drives build.

I also have a side panel issue, 212 evo is a freaking tall cooler.
without the side panels you have basically a bench chassis, easy to get into and easy to work on.
a strategically placed fan and you can cool as well as a case. no panels let the heat rise as it tends to, being replaced by cooler air, a fan or two to halp nature and your good.

 

[fzabkar]

WD Gold drives are often rebadged HGST helium models. Examine the WWN on the label and the part number on the PCB. For example, WD's PCBs begin with "2060-" while HGST's begin with "OA".

 

[AtkinsFriendly]

Go with RED for basic RAIDs. Gold is usually needed for high performance raids so unless you need that, it's cheaper to stick with RED.

I use Reds for NVR systems where there is a constant slow write speed and only have had a couple drives go bad out of 60 or 70 of them.

 

[mdd1963]

WD Reds are quite popular in NAS units, as are Seagate's Ironwolfs.... (I still like HGST's 7200 rpm 4 TB units, personally)

 

[fzabkar]

Watch out for this:

A new twist to IntelliPower?
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=38333