Desktop RAID 1. Red or Black Drives?

Will boot from an SSD drive and have a pair of mechanical drives for data storage in RAID 1 configuration.

Main application of PC is normal computing and HD video rendering. Will render video files to RAID drives.

Buy red or black drives?

Thanks

Hi Vguitarist. WD Red drives are designed for multi-drive RAID use and the vibrations and stress that comes with a RAID array. WD Black is designed for single drive usage so it may not work optimally in a RAID.

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On paper, you’re right. I’ve been running black drives in RAID arrays for years without problems – likely because I’m not striping across the drives (that would be risky). I only became aware of red drives when I purchased a WD NAS device. For the reasons you mentioned, I’m curious if red drives would be better? That said, I don’t want to sacrifice performance over stability. Thoughts?

Before there was a NAS drive line, WD Black could possibly be used for small RAID environments and we did list basic RAID support for the Intel controllers since they would account for the drives not having TLER. However, since WD Red has been released, WD Black was optimized for performance all references to RAID use removed.

I’m not saying that WD Black won’t work, as you have demonstrated, it just isn’t designed for that type of environemt and failures could occur more frequently in an environment the drive wasn’t designed for.

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For the sake of my next question, let’s assume for a moment that black drives will work fine. We know black drives have a faster spin rate than red drives – which, presumably, makes them inherently faster (faster is better when rendering video). So, if I lined both up, side-by-side, would the red drive RAID perform as well as the black drive RAID?

If you ignore the RAID and NAS features, the Red drives are more comparable to the Green drives. They are fine for low performance, but also low noise and temperature operations.

However, for video editing you need more speed and need more Workstation-like features. Since it is a simple disc-to-disc mirror, you can run Black, but I would rather use the Se (or even the Re). They are essentially Blacks, but designed for RAID setups. Just beware that they are much hotter than the Red/Green drives so provide good airflow for them.