Western Digital RE or Black

[akshayshah]

Planning to buy 2TB HDD. I am confused between WD black and WD RE. There are comparison benchmarks available for their 4TB version. But I am not sure which parameter will be more important for my use? I am planning to store data and install games on that.gaming performance is the main concern. Now I know that no hdd is going to impact frame rates but I love lower loading times. SSD is not an option I already have 256gb ssd as my boot drive.

What parameter in benchmark can be directly responsible for loading times? Random read or sequential read. RE is better at 4k random reads and black is marginally better than RE when it comes to sequential read writes. Here is the link of the article I read. Please help me choosing the right drive. Fzex and fyyz are my considerations.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/2013/11/13/western-digital-4-tb-roundup-black-vs-enterprise/

 

[JQB45]

Not strictly related to performance. The RE drives are designed for 24x7 enterprise server use and come with a 5 year warranty. The SE and black drives do as well. I personally like the idea of buying the RE or SE over the black drives for the piece of mind knowing I will not be punishing the drive 24 x 7 even though they are designed for just that purpose.

So while they may only have a 5 year warranty I suspect a defect free RE or SE will live a long useful life. Some people site their cost as simply to high when the black drives give the same performance. But I then have to ask myself, how much are my pictures, my work, my personal information all worth if I were to loose it? At that point even the very expensive RE drives become a bargain.

Sorry I can't answer your question directly but I did want to give my 2 cents as to their expected reliability.

Good luck finding an answer specific to your performance question. I'll be following this thread.

I couldn't get that link to load and this is the 2TB WD SE Drive I was refering to:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236522

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey akshayashah. If you'd have to choose from one of this drives and your main concern is gaming, I'd definitely recommend the WD Black instead of the WD Re. The WD Re is a datacenter storage solution meant for servers. The WD Black is a 7200RPM drive as well, but with features which boost its performance when it comes to gaming. If on the other hand you want an even faster drive - this would be the WD VelociRaptor, which is a very reliable 10 000RPM drive and it has a 5-year limited warranty just like the WD Black, but it only goes up to 1TB. Here's a link where you can check out it's features if you'd like to consider it: WD VelociRaptor
Check everything out if you will, but if I were you, I'd go for the 4TB WD Black drive.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[akshayshah]

Hey akshayashah. If you'd have to choose from one of this drives and your main concern is gaming, I'd definitely recommend the WD Black instead of the WD Re. The WD Re is a datacenter storage solution meant for servers. The WD Black is a 7200RPM drive as well, but with features which boost its performance when it comes to gaming. If on the other hand you want an even faster drive - this would be the WD VelociRaptor, which is a very reliable 10 000RPM drive and it has a 5-year limited warranty just like the WD Black, but it only goes up to 1TB. Here's a link where you can check out it's features if you'd like to consider it: WD VelociRaptor
Check everything out if you will, but if I were you, I'd go for the 4TB WD Black drive.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

Agree that the RE drives are meant for servers, But I am confused whether random read write or sequential read write improves loading time? If random reads are responsible for the lower loading times then I would get RE else will stick with WD black. As such i keep backups for irreplaceable data so I won't mind if black is less reliable than RE. Velociraptor is faster but not by much if one compares the price premium.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Well the differences won't be very noticeable while playing. The sequential speed is more important when it comes to large files such as multimedia files or backups, while the 4K random read speed shows how effective a device is at quickly retrieving small pieces of data from different locations. This is most common during OS startup, where lots of configuration and driver files must be read from the disk and some applications (which might also refer to some games as well). Even though this points to the WD Re as your choice, I'm still adamant when it comes to my advice for the drive and it's the WD Black.
Take a look at this feature in particular -

Dynamic Cache
WD's dynamic caching algorithm improves performance in real time by optimizing cache allocation between reads and writes. For example, if there's an overwhelming percentage of read traffic as opposed to write traffic, the drive automatically allocates more cache for read data, which reduces congestion and improves overall drive performance.

At the end of the day it's your choice, so go with whatever you think will suit you better, but that's my advice.