which hard drive ?

[area51]

I need to get a new hard drive. I've been happy with WD but I am little confused between blue, green , models. Can anyone help ? The drive would be used as a secondary drive for media. the os system runs on a 640 wd which is plenty fast for my needs...

are the caviar series worth the extra $ ?

[wvdcm3]

It won't matter much really, especially since you're using the drive as storage. Just shop by size and price. The important thing is to have multiple backups of your data.

But, to address your question, see this PDF file that compares the black-blue & green WD drives.

[dandan3000]

From my understanding GREENS use less power and are a bit slower. Saves % for people who use many drives together. Red I believe is designed for NAS users which is like data base stuff. Blue and Black is what most consumers use . The Black has a 5 year warranty compared to 3 on the Blue. Black is supposed to be a tad bit more reliable and have a little faster read and write speeds. Personally I have the WD black 1tb 7200rpm. Not sure If its worth the extra 30-40 over the blue.

[the86d]

Seagates used to be terrible in the MFM-RLL days, then w (E)IDE they got better, and their SATA OEM line (3-5year warranty) is GREAT, however I just lost one in less than 2 years to creeping bad sectors (S.M.A.R.T. let me know and I haven't replaced in in 3 months with Christmas around the corner).

I don't trust my data on WD drives, (unless enterprise?) as it seems they like to start having issues more than other brands in the rigs I have looked at.

Any data that you don't have in at least 2 places, is data that you don't care about...

[stilly]

Seagates used to be terrible in the MFM-RLL days, then w (E)IDE they got better, and their SATA OEM line (3-5year warranty) is GREAT, however I just lost one in less than 2 years to creeping bad sectors (S.M.A.R.T. let me know and I haven't replaced in in 3 months with Christmas around the corner).

I don't trust my data on WD drives, (unless enterprise?) as it seems they like to start having issues more than other brands in the rigs I have looked at.

Any data that you don't have in at least 2 places, is data that you don't care about...

hey hey now! I have a couple of 20MB MFM seagate drives that still work... Well, okay, I aint plugged them because I don;t have a controller card for them, but they worked when they were unplugged about 17 years ago...


OP:
RED is for NAS, Green is for prius drives. Blue or Black WD drives are the ONLY drives I will purchase unless I can get RED for a good price. But the WD RED drives are similar to SEAGATE Constellation ES drives. I am uncertain as to what an enterprise class HD is from WD. I see that Toshiba and Hitachi are used a lot in notebooks, and I THINK Panasonic Toughbooks use Hitachi drives, but if panasonic uses a Hitachi drive in their toughbook, then that has to say something for Hitachi...

Personally speaking, I have heard good thigns from people here about WD OEM drives. If you can get a WD scorpio or OEM drive in BLACK edition then I would go for it, Otherwise I would stick with my Seagate Constellation ES drives. They are costing me about $30-$70 for a 500GB drive in 3.5" form. I will NEVER buy another GREEN WD drive. I killed the one I had, I bought a 1TB green and hooked it up to my comp, moved 798MB of data onto it and then it gave me SMART errors and said it was on the verge of failing... SO, it sits unplugged until I feel like plugging it back in to move the data off of it (which I will when I build a 32TB NAS running ZFS...)

If you look, you can find many drives on Ebay from US sellers that buy servers adn then replace the hard drives with their own so they sell PULLED drives. That was how I got 7 Constellation ES 500GB drives for $27 each. They work like a champ, been going strong now for over 7 months and no problems from anyone.

[bg]

I only use Blacks for my units and clients units. I only buy them from
B&H Camera, and only retail..For instance.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/998254-REG/western_digital_wd3200bekx_wd_black_mobile.html

[Bastard]

as a media storage I recommend, though might cost a little bit more, running 2 RED drives set up as a RAID 1 (mirrored) which is very simple in window 7 and newer.

I am sure that many will say that it is a waste, and yes it does cost twice as much but if you have ever had a terabyte drive fail causing a loss on all media on it... the redundancy is very nice worth the extra price

[like2angle]

I have been using Hybrid hard drives in all my builds. They use flash memory for repetitive operations making them faster than standard drives yet still have large storage capacity. They also boot faster.

Check them here :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=hybrid+hard+drive&N=-1&isNodeId=1

[atc4usmc]

+1 on the hybrid drive!! Also if its a server or NAS then RAID 1 is the only way to go. If not back often and keep a copy offsite!

[sholling]

WD uses colors to easily differentiate their product lines:

• Blue = economy products, 2 year warranty. Just a basic hard drive.
• Green = most energy efficient (lowest cost to run) 5400rpm drives, 2 year warranty. A great choice for a second drive that's used primarily for data, but not a good boot drive because they're kinda slow.
• Black = high performance 7200 rpm drives, 5 year warranty. These run a bit hot and suck electricity but are better for your operating system drive and video editing drive than a much slower 'green drive'.
  
• Red = optimised for RAID arrays, 3 year warranty. Not quite as economical as a "green" drive, but the most compatible/safe to use as pary of a RAID array.

For your purposes a "green" is a probably a good choice, although mirroring two Reds (if your controler supports it) would be a much better solution for your data.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/

[NYT]

fyi, i was in frys on friday and they have green drives boxed in black boxes now. i think wd might be going away from the color coding thing. i returned it thinking someone scammed frys and when i opened another box on the floor it was the same green branded drive in a black box.

[C.G.]

If you can afford it get an SSD instead.

[dynamomark80]

The Green drives tune the speed based on the need of the system so it can soin up to 7200 if need to maximize performance or spin slower to minimize power usage and noise. Not a bad feature for a PC that is running all the time whether in use or not. The Blue run fast at 7200rpm all the time just waiting to be used. The Black spin at 7200rpm but the drive controller works much better and the cache is large at 64MB. Consider the Black drives like a boosted version of the Blue drives. I prefer the Blue for drive often access and the Green for data I dont get to regularly such as backups. Black for my large game files and not much else at the moment.

so you need to find out what media files you are going to store on this new drive. home video, pictures, and documents you dont want to lose i would strongly go with 2 or more drive in a raid setup to prevent lose of data by drive failure. if you are storing HD video I would stay away from all 5400 rpm drives with small cache. most likely you could get one or two 7200 rpm drives be good to go. I would NEVER recommend a SSD for valuable data unless in a raid setup because if the drive fails your data in many cases cant be retrieved. With a non-hybrid traditional drive if the drive fails the data in most cases can still be retrieved. I also suggest going with a SATA 6.0GB/s capable of faster data transfer although your current computer might not support this if you ever got a newer system that did you can pop these drives in to get the performance boost.

Yet another option is get a Hybrid or SSD for the OS and use the 640 WD drive you have now for your storage needs. This would give your system a little performance boost in general but not safeguard your self from data loss in the event of a drive failure.

My basic ideal setup would be
1 SSD for the OS/main drive (128GB would be fine)
2 Traditional drives (7200rpm, 1TB are cheap now) setup in RAID 1 for my precious data I cant lose
1 Traditional drive (7200rpm, 500GB is ok but at least 2-3 times size of OS/main drive) for OS weekly backups

food for thought if you have or can get a hold of some DVR cable boxes that are not being used crack those puppies open and grab the drives out of them. I got some good WD blue and Black drives out of some. if you see the cable guy around chat it up and see if you can score a few boxes off him. Out of 6 boxes I cracked open I got 5 working drives 500GB up to 750GB but this was also few years ago. Now days the drives in the DVR boxes should be much larger.

[chiefcrash]

Stay away from the 1TB+ Greens. They seem to crap out considerably quicker...

[Jimmy Deuce]

My 2 cents of course the hardware is always job specific. Traditional hard drives are prone to failure after 3 years. I have seen some die well before that. The important thing as mentioned is backing up your data. If possible replace that drive every 3 years. remember traditional hard drives have moving parts and just like anything else with moving parts they will eventually fail.

General use traditional hard drive

Sata 3
7200 rpm or greater
Standard warranties are usually a year anything with a longer is better as if it fails they will replace it. Having said that a warranty will not prevent loss of or recover your data.

Or
Look into SSD(solid state drive)
No moving parts less chance of failure over time