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WD red for desktop?

33K views 16 replies 8 participants last post by  Lady Fitzgerald 
#1 ·
So, this morning my trusty 1tb barracuda start making the dreaded clicking noises. Seeing as I have ~860gb of stuff, most of which I need to use in the next few days and rather not lose. I went out and bought a 4tb WD red. (they only stocked WD's, didn't have black/green/blue's and the red was the only 4tb one. Plus I was in a rush to get a working drive).

I was wondering is there any disadvantages/advantages in using the drive in a desktop instead of the intended nas server?
 
#3 ·
Ahh okay thanks.
smile.gif
 
#4 ·
I use a WD Red on the desktop. It's pretty excellent because it's very quiet which is what I was after. It might be the fastest 5400 RPM drive.

Internally, it's probably related to the Green, has a similar speed. Compared to the Green, the WD Red gets stuff done faster in benchmarks that try to simulate application use, boot times, etc. Some synthetics looked better on the Green I think, but the Red strangely ends up beating it in practice.

The firmware has differences (besides whatever it does that makes it win in benchmarks). It does not do that head-parking after a handful of seconds like the Green. This might prolong life for the Red. A big, serious difference is that if it encounters surface errors, it will by default give up on reading/writing after seven seconds. This is so that it won't get dropped by RAID controllers in a NAS. A normal desktop drive instead retries reading/writing for minutes, so pretty much completely locks up if it runs into an error on the disks. The feature is called "TLER". If you want to disable that, you need to do that after every boot because the drive will forget it after shutdown.

A tool that can disable TLER would be "smartmontools". It's a command line tool and comes from Linux, but there's a Windows port. You'd have to schedule to execute "smartctl -l scterc,0,0 /dev/sdb" at each boot (that /dev/sdb means it's the second drive, or you can use a drive letter on Windows instead of that).

Here's an article on Wikipedia about TLER: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

The "wdtler" DOS tool mentioned does not work on the WD Red as far as I've seen.

I don't know if that TLER stuff is really serious or not. The desktop drives locking up for minutes when they can't read data typically won't save anything, just be annoying. Afterwards, you'll probably replace the drive anyway because your confidence in it will drop to zero.
 
#6 ·
The Reds are getting worse user reviews than the other WD drives.
 
#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

The Reds are getting worse user reviews than the other WD drives.
Unless the failure rates of the reds are higher than the 3tb+ barracudas, it shouldn't pose much of a problem.
 
#8 ·
Forgot to ask, according to the specs the formatted capacity is 4tb, but when I used disk management to format the drive it became 3.63tb. Is it suppose to be like that?
 
#9 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by N3C14R View Post

Forgot to ask, according to the specs the formatted capacity is 4tb, but when I used disk management to format the drive it became 3.63tb. Is it suppose to be like that?
Mine are the same way. I have a 2tb red and a black and they both come out to 1.81tb after the format.
 
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#10 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by N3C14R View Post

Unless the failure rates of the reds are higher than the 3tb+ barracudas, it shouldn't pose much of a problem.
They are.
 
#11 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by N3C14R View Post

Forgot to ask, according to the specs the formatted capacity is 4tb, but when I used disk management to format the drive it became 3.63tb. Is it suppose to be like that?
Yes. The formatted capacity of all drives is actually less than the rated capcity.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

Quote:
Originally Posted by N3C14R View Post

Unless the failure rates of the reds are higher than the 3tb+ barracudas, it shouldn't pose much of a problem.
They are.
You sure? In the specifications, the WD Red has higher MTBF than the Seagate Barracuda. Where I'm from, WD grants three years warranty on the Red compared to two years on the Seagate Barracuda. So WD seems to be more confident in the Red than Seagate with their Barracuda.
 
#13 ·
The reds are supposed to be up to the 24/7 beating of NAS servers and have a corresponding increase in reliability. I do not guess they have been around long enough to prove themselves either way yet. I run two in RAID 1 in my personal machine at home and I swapped all the NAS servers at work over to the reds. They have definitely proven faster for us in the NAS servers. (faster access times maybe?). Anyway, i have 20 in service right now so i guess time will tell on their reliability for me. The NAS servers were using up a WD green, at least one or two a year. But we run a lot of data throughput.
 
#14 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by deepor View Post

You sure? In the specifications, the WD Red has higher MTBF than the Seagate Barracuda. Where I'm from, WD grants three years warranty on the Red compared to two years on the Seagate Barracuda. So WD seems to be more confident in the Red than Seagate with their Barracuda.
MTBF is more of a prediction based on lab tests. User reviews are based on actual events by people actually using the product. Read the reviews.
 
#15 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

MTBF is more of a prediction based on lab tests. User reviews are based on actual events by people actually using the product. Read the reviews.
One online shop here in Germany shows the RMA percentages for their products (it's mindfactory.de). There's nothing unusual going on there regarding various Seagate drives and WD drives, RMA is at 1% or 2% everywhere I look. I can't find Barracuda in that shop, only Seagate Desktop and NAS and Enterprise. The WD Red at 3TB and 4TB both have 1% RMA, were sold 27000 times and 5800 times respectively.
 
#16 ·
Lets try and remember that user reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt, as an upset customer is something like seven times more likely to comment or complain than a satisfied customer.

WD red drives are essentially Greens with a firmware that strengthens random read/write because of its intended use as a NAS drive and a dynamic rpm speed.

Generally, the single most common reason for a non DOA drive to fail within the first several weeks or first few months of operation is poor handling during shipping.
Anything past that timeframe is essentially rolling the dice the same way you would on any other super fragile piece of technology.

Personally, Ive had nothing but good experiences with WD Red drives.
But ive also had success with Hitachi, and Seagate, so I may just be lucky.
 
#17 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilWrir View Post

Lets try and remember that user reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt, as an upset customer is something like seven times more likely to comment or complain than a satisfied customer...
True that (although I've read it's more like ten times) but it's also true for all products across the board. It's the comparison of complaints between products that matters (along with the nature of the complaints). If one HDD from a vendor garners more user complaints than another HDD from the same vendor, there is a pretty good chance the HDD with the more complaints is inferior to the other one. When multiple vendors have the same complaint ratios, it's pretty much a guarantee. You can't compare complaints from one vendor directly to complaints from another vendor except as an indication of vendor quality. If vendor A gets far more complaints about a product than vendor B, it's a sign that vendor A may be using poor shipping practices, causing damage in transit or is reselling defective merchandise. One has to actually read the complaints to weed out problems caused by stupidity and to look for recurring patterns to get a feel for what the problem actually is.

All HDD manufacturers will have occasional bad batches. User reviews are about the only way to detect when that happens.
 
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