 Duramax08Win8 sucksPremium
join:2008-08-03
San Antonio, TX
 ·Millenicom
·Cricket Broadband
| Western Digital Red in stores now Browsing newegg and saw this today..
»www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a···22236342
WD site: »www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810
"WD Red - The new color of NAS.
WD Red hard drives are designed and tested for compatibility in the unique 24x7 operating environment and demanding system requirements of home and small office NAS."
Article: »news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-574···d-drive/ |
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 Camelot OnePremium,MVM
join:2001-11-21
Greenwood, IN
kudos:1 | Interesting. Though it sounds like they figured out a new way to get a little more $$ out of the green series by modifying the power save function in the firmware.
But I might have to pick up a couple and do some testing. |
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 DarkLogixTexan and ProudPremium
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX
kudos:3 | Sounds to me the green are aimed at powersaving
the Black at gamers
and the red at 24x7 use |
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Camelot OnePremium,MVM
join:2001-11-21
Greenwood, IN
kudos:1 | Thats my point though. The green are designed for 24/7 use, they just go to sleep to save power, which causes issues with NAS. If WD just tweaked that power save setting a little, rebranded it with a different color, they could sell an entirely new line of drives. Much as they did with the new Raid/Non-Raid versions. |
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 OctaveanPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-31
New York, NY
kudos:1 | reply to Duramax08
Looks OK to me, I might try one out,...
quote:
Extremely quiet operation thanks to a new dynamic balancing mechanism built into the spindle motor hub. The drive essentially re-balances itself on-the-fly as temperatures change, etc.
• Seeks are equally quiet - quiet enough that a bunch of these doing random access outside of an enclosure would barely be audible from only a few feet away.
• Great sequential throughput (~150MB/sec at start of disk, ramping down to ~65MB/sec at the end).
• Random access times in the 20ms range - likely due to the very quiet seeking mechanism.
• Red Series drives will all be advanced format (i.e. internally addressed by 4k sectors).
• Reds will all be 1TB/platter, available in 1, 2, and 3TB capacities. This gives similar throughput figures regardless of capacity purchased.
• 3-year warranty, with a 24/7 support hotline specifically for Red owners.
• Red drives feature a QR code on the label to assist with any support issues down the road.
»www.pcper.com/news/Storage/Weste···d-drives |
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 koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:20
2 edits | reply to Camelot One
The actual problem with the Green series isn't that they "go to sleep". The biggest problem seems to be with WD's absolutely unjustified aggressive parking of heads which impacts throughput. The "idle timeout" on these things appears to be somewhere between 7 and 10 seconds, which is way too aggressive. This impacts everything, ranging from desktops to NASes -- there is no segregation.
You can also see in my blog post that not all WD Caviar Black drives advertise the same capabilities -- as shown one offers AAM, while the other does not, yet they're the same firmware version. *sighs* (Edit: Sorry, I said APM, I meant AAM. Different feature, but my point is still valid -- not the same firmware, yet the same firmware number is shown, and the same model).
I'll see about ordering one of these drives (the WD Reds) and run them through the wringer compared to a WD Caviar Black of the same capacity. I'm not talking about benchmarks: I'm talking about drive behaviour and actual ATA capabilities advertised. Those are what matter.
Personally, I think WD is doing exactly what those of us in the storage industry figured they'd start doing: sell the exact same product with different ATA capability and firmware tweaks, then charge a premium for it as if it has been re-engineered to solve everyone's problems. This is what they've been doing with the Green vs. Black drives as well -- there's only one physical difference and it has to do with shock absorption, the rest is all firmware.
EDIT: And do not get me started on TLER. It's completely and entirely pointless, since the underlying storage controller can/will define a timeout interval for acknowledgement responses from a disk. TLER is just a horrible hack to work around controllers (or more specifically the drivers used by the controller) which... well... suck. On most *IX OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) those timeouts can be set on a per-port, per-controller basis and do not mandate use of TLER. So don't let anyone try to "sell" you on TLER.
EDIT #2: This quote really, really pissed me off:
quote:
“Until now, customers had to choose between using desktop or high-end server drives for their home or small office NAS systems – neither of which were both cost effective for consumer solutions and fully NAS compatible,” said Melyssa Banda, senior director of product marketing for WD. “WD saw this challenge as a perfect opportunity to design a better solution so we developed WD Red drives, an optimized product for this rapidly growing segment.”
"Until now"? Prior to you (and Seagate, and Maxtor, and Fujitsu, and Toshiba, and Samsung, and Hitachi...) introducing absolutely unnecessary features that you don't allow to be toggled on/off via standard ATA protocol, anyone could buy a hard disk and it would work just fine for any purpose. So all you folks did was introduce a bunch of crap into the market that limited the spectrum of product use, solely so you could sell other products. So, "until now?" YOU created this problem!
All WD is doing at this point is selling the same product with firmware tweaks. Oh what I would give for a hard disk that did not try to "get in the way" of my I/O transactions...
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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 GbcueP.E.Premium
join:2001-09-30
Santa Rosa, CA
kudos:8 | Since you appear to know what you're talking about, how much money is saved say, going from a WD Blue or WD Black to a WD Green/Red drive in a NAS environment? A few cents a year? For a home user, who doesn't have hundreds (but only 4-8) of HDs running in a NAS, does this savings be negligible? If so, then why wouldn't one just buy Black and have the speed and warranty... |
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Camelot OnePremium,MVM
join:2001-11-21
Greenwood, IN
kudos:1 | said by Gbcue:Since you appear to know what you're talking about, how much money is saved say, going from a WD Blue or WD Black to a WD Green/Red drive in a NAS environment? A few cents a year? For a home user, who doesn't have hundreds (but only 4-8) of HDs running in a NAS, does this savings be negligible? If so, then why wouldn't one just buy Black and have the speed and warranty...
Heat would be the biggest issue in most cases. The greens are fast enough for NAS use, but run much cooler than the Blacks. I would assume the Red would also be a cooler running drive. |
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 kingdome74Emotionally UnavailablePremium
join:2002-03-27
Syracuse, NY
kudos:3 | reply to Duramax08
I've looked through everything but what speed are these little commie baktards spinning at? |
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JoelC707Premium
join:2002-07-09
West Point, GA
kudos:5 | The spec sheet: »www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/S···1442.pdf claims the RPM is "IntelliPower". I take that to mean it's the same as the Green drives with a variable? RPM motor, likely 5400-5900 RPM on average. |
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 Tursiops_GTechnoidPremium,MVM
join:2002-02-06
Norwalk, CT | reply to Camelot One
I've got 2 WD 2TB Greens (Mirrored) running just fine in a Synology DS211J NAS... All I needed to do was prep them first with the WDIDLE3 utility and a PC. (Set the Idle Park timeout to 300 Sec.). 
They've been running 24/7 flawlessly for over a year. (Knock Wood) 
(Ugh... Typing on my Netbook at 30,000 ft on a Bumpy Delta flight to San Diego... URp!!) 
-Tursiops_G.
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If You're Unsure, "RTFM"... If You're SURE, "RTFM" Anyway. |
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koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:20 | reply to JoelC707
The Green drives being "variable RPM" was debunked a while back. I can try to find the analysis article. I believe they run at around 6000rpm, so faster than 5400rpm but slower than 7200rpm. "IntelliPower" is just a buzzword that WD throws around rather than state real-world numbers.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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JoelC707Premium
join:2002-07-09
West Point, GA
kudos:5 | Ahhh cool I suspected it wasn't actually variable as that would likely require some adjustments be made in firmware when it changed RPM wouldn't it? Or something like that? Either way I'd love to see that article. |
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koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:20 | reply to Gbcue
said by Gbcue:Since you appear to know what you're talking about, how much money is saved say, going from a WD Blue or WD Black to a WD Green/Red drive in a NAS environment? A few cents a year? For a home user, who doesn't have hundreds (but only 4-8) of HDs running in a NAS, does this savings be negligible? If so, then why wouldn't one just buy Black and have the speed and warranty...
The savings are absolutely negligible. Camelot One  talks about heat (I guess implying the Red drives run cooler), but until I actually get one in my hands and do the testing myself I can't say if that's true or false. I won't be buying one until Amazon has them for sale, as I can return the product without any hassle (vs. NewEgg who will charge me restocking fees and other nonsense, plus I have to pay shipping *and* CA tax).
Assuming we're talking about 3.5" drives here...
The WD Blue drives run at 7200rpm. In my experience they run cooler than the Black drives, but I have only worked with one WD Blue drive in all my years. I imagine the reason for this is drive-level APM. Performance I have never tested so I cannot comment there. Seek noise is unknown to me as well; didn't check for it.
The WD Green drives run at ~6000rpm (what WD markets as "IntelliPower"), and in my experience they tend to run 6-7C cooler than the WD Blacks. Again in my experience, this is due to APM. If I disable APM, the WD Green drives I've tinkered with tend to run around the same temperatures as my WD Black drives. Performance-wise the Green drives are "meh". They tend to run around 30-40MBytes (sequential) slower than the Black drives. Seek noise tends to be tolerable and less noticeable than Blacks.
The Green drives, as I proved in my aforementioned link/blog, have a very bad design choice (in the firmware) to try and park the heads as aggressively as possible. WD advertises this feature as "IntelliPark". Stay away from this thing, no matter what purpose the drive has.
The WD Black drives run at 7200rpm. Temperature-wise, originally the first and 2nd generation Black drives were acceptable given that APM is disabled (and cannot be toggled) in the firmware. Speed-wise they'd tend to run around 150-160MBytes/second sequential, read/writes. Seek noise tends to be loud, though it greatly depends on platter count too (keep reading).
The most recent Black drives, temperature-wise, are generally not very cool. The reason for this has to do with the increased number of platters. The drives tend to be 3 or 4 platters for larger capacities; more platters + more heads + arms = more heat. More platters/heads/arms/heat = higher chance of failure. The drives perform only slightly (maybe 2-3MBytes) faster than previous versions. Do not let the SATA600 PHY make you think they'll perform better either -- that's purely a marketing ploy. The things barely use more than half of SATA300.
BTW, about my sequential speeds: as we all know MHDDs decrease in performance as the heads move inwards (towards the spindle motor). I don't tend to care about the performance of a drive past the 20% capacity mark -- I can safely guess what it's going to be seeing the initial 20%.
Also, I'm going to throw this fact in there: don't let cache be a deciding factor for you. I have drives with 32MBytes cache and drives with 64MBytes cache, and the performance difference is nil. In fact, I have one WD1002FAEX where the performance is worse than the earlier generation model (32MBytes; WD1001FALS). Drive I/O is "bursty" -- you see massive I/O speed, then suddenly all I/O just halts hard as the drive churns horribly, then it "catches up" and so on. Again: bad firmware design.
Because WD keeps screwing with their firmwares -- and these Red drives are certainly no exception to that now-well-established rule -- I ended up trying other vendors.
I tried Seagate and found that their drives also aggressively park heads (their own specification docs state their flagship ST3000DM001 drive supports up to 300,000 parks/unparks -- yet there are already users that state they've had their drive for a few months and have reached over 250,000). Worse (to me, as someone who is picky about noise), I can actually hear these drives parking/unparking their heads. You can find all sorts of people on the 'net complaining about it: search for "Seagate noise" or "Seagate screech". The exact same problem happens on the ST1000DM001 and the ST2000DM001, so don't let the capacity make you think its changed. This is purely, 100%, a firmware design choice. It's not a "bad batch", and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Finally I decided, after almost 10 years of avoiding them like the plague, to try Hitachi (what was then IBM). I've been completely amazed. I really expected a crappy product, but I got something that's significantly quieter than my WD Black during all forms of seeks (including a full LBA 0 to LBA max surface scan -- I was like "Is this thing even on?"), and the performance is actually better than the Blacks. And not to my surprise, the thing has 32MBytes cache, and is significantly cheaper than the WD Black drives.
So that leads me to price...
Overall right now, WD is making bank. I have ranted about this for months now, specifically ever since the Thailand flooding incident. If you want proof that WD prices went through the roof and then never came back down to tolerable levels (while Seagate and other companies in Thailand also impacted DID drop to tolerable price levels), go visit »www.camelegg.com/ and look up all the WD Caviar Black drive models vs. other models (I do this at the bottom of my post). Only starting semi-recently did the prices start to drop, and some have never dropped back to their original levels. So many people (including here on this forum) kept claiming "it's because of supply and demand" -- no, it wasn't. It's purely WD making bank, or possibly using customer money to pay for the flooding repairs. And honestly, if WD was charging insane amounts of money for their drives to make up for the flooding, ask yourself this: at what point did consumers decide that WD should put their fabs in Thailand? Now ask yourself why we should be paying for that. Who should? Simple: company owners, or shareholders, that's who. Welcome to what "making an investment" means -- you take risks. You can't always win, but of course shareholders must win at all times; type A personalities, "I am the winner, everyone else can suffer".
Anyway, instead of just bitching, let me give you real market numbers right now, from Amazon unless otherwise noted. I'm excluding the "half-size" drives (i.e. 1.5TB, 2.5TB, etc.), and these are sorted by price:
US$95 = WD10EARX (WD Green 1TB)
US$109 = WD10EFRX (WD Red 1TB) -- NewEgg
US$119 = WD20EARX (WD Green 2TB)
US$129 = WD20EFRX (WD Red 2TB) -- NewEgg
US$149 = WD30EZRX (WD Green 3TB)
US$119 = WD1002FAEX (WD Black 1TB)
US$179 = WD30EFRX (WD Red 3TB) -- NewEgg
US$192 = WD2002FAEX (WD Black 2TB)
US$85 = ST1000DM001 (Seagate 1TB)
US$107 = ST2000DM001 (Seagate 2TB)
US$149 = ST3000DM001 (Seagate 3TB)
n/a = HDS723015BLA642 (Hitachi 7K3000 1TB) -- deprecated?
US$129 = HDS723020BLA642 (Hitachi 7K3000 2TB)
US$209 = HDS723030ALA640 (Hitachi 7K3000 3TB)
Based on these prices, and the firmware behaviours, the choice of what drive to go with became pretty clear to me (I was shopping for a 2TB model at the time).
And here are links to all those drives on CamelEgg. I've excluded the Red drives because they *just came out*.
* WD10EARX (WD Green 1TB)
* WD20EARX (WD Green 2TB)
* WD30EZRX (WD Green 3TB)
* WD1002FAEX (WD Black 1TB)
* WD2002FAEX (WD Black 2TB)
* ST1000DM001 (Seagate 1TB) -- not available on CamelEgg
* ST2000DM001 (Seagate 2TB)
* ST3000DM001 (Seagate 3TB)
* HDS723015BLA642 (Hitachi 7K3000 1TB)
* HDS723020BLA642 (Hitachi 7K3000 2TB)
* HDS723030ALA640 (Hitachi 7K3000 3TB) -- not available on CamelEgg
Now go re-read the news articles about who all had fabs in Thailand during the flooding and, hopefully, reach the same conclusion I have (that this not supply and demand, this is something more nefarious). And don't forget that Western Digital bought Hitachi (HGST) in March 2012, so we're effectively down to 2 MHDD vendors right now (WD and Seagate). But 2 is still a choice, right?!?!? Just like Comcast and AT&T......
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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| said by koitsu:The Green drives, as I proved in my aforementioned link/blog, have a very bad design choice (in the firmware) to try and park the heads as aggressively as possible. WD advertises this feature as "IntelliPark". Stay away from this thing, no matter what purpose the drive has.
While the green drives may have serious drawbacks, they work reasonably well in cases with insufficient airflow. I have a Dell minitower where once a Hitachi roasted itself unconscious overnight, then some Seagate was running around 45 - 50C, and now the WD Green is normally below 40C. It's a dedicated data drive, so that additional latency doesn't really break things.
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Wacky Races 2012! |
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DarkLogixTexan and ProudPremium
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX
kudos:3 | reply to Camelot One
said by Camelot One:Thats my point though. The green are designed for 24/7 use, they just go to sleep to save power, which causes issues with NAS. If WD just tweaked that power save setting a little, rebranded it with a different color, they could sell an entirely new line of drives. Much as they did with the new Raid/Non-Raid versions.
but for a nas you don't want it going to sleep |
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DarkLogixTexan and ProudPremium
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX
kudos:3 | reply to koitsu
Whats your opinion of the enterprise seagate constellation drives?
ignore the price just as to how they do as temp/speed/ ect goes. |
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koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:20 | said by DarkLogix:Whats your opinion of the enterprise seagate constellation drives?
ignore the price just as to how they do as temp/speed/ ect goes.
Entire, complete, utter crap. We used them exclusively at my previous job across multiple international datacenters. The failure rate was astounding -- something like 25% (yes, really that high). I was the one doing the analysis almost every time, and I can assure you these failures were physical, usually massive numbers of bad sectors or read/write speeds that were horrible (3-4MBytes/second) combined with indications that the drive was having to do excessive ECC on every single sector read/write (indicating something very, very wrong either mechanically or with the substrate).
"Enterprise grade" on SATA hard disks means absolutely nothing. You might get a longer warranty, and a slightly modified firmware, or better shock/vibration handling, but other than that there is no difference between those and the high-end consumer drives. If that's worth it to you then go ahead and pay the $100 added premium.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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| reply to Duramax08
I wish that WD would upgrade their Blue line. They only top out at 1TB, and I rather like my 6400AAKS (640 GB Blue). I would buy a 2tb 2 platter Blue drive in a heartbeat. |
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DarkLogixTexan and ProudPremium
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX
kudos:3 | reply to koitsu
well the only constellation drive I have at home is connected to my DVR
I figured the DVR is accessing the drive 24/7
though you know they do make SAS constellation drives too.
I might connect the drive to a computer sometime and run an analysis on it. |
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