1TB Black or 1TB Gold

When it comes to trying to finding a suitable HDD for a RAID environment I am a bit newby. So I have come here to hopefully get some suggestions. We are looking at replacing our old Seagate 250GB SATA HDDs with new 1TB HDDs that a more easily available and actually would be cheaper. We also have a high failure rate of around 6 per week which is a bit of a concern. The points are:

  • We have up to 150 worsktations in our network that are in use 24x7.
  • Each workstation consists of 2 HDD that is running RAID 1.
  • Each workstation is installed with old LSI 2-Port, 3Gb/s SATA,PCIe, 128MB Cache RAID card.
  • Due to contractual obligations we cannot upgrade the RAID card.

I was thinking to use the 1TB Black HDD WD1003FZEX when I saw that in the brochure it says that “Desktop/Consumer RAID Environments - WD Black PC Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID 0 or RAID 1)”
But underneath it says that the Black HDDs are not recommended for use in Business Critical RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and to consider using Enterprise Hard Drives that are tested in 24x7 RAID applications.
This now has me thinking that maybe I should be looking at using a 1TB Gold HDD instead. I just don’t want to end up purchasing the Black models to end up finding they a failing at the same rate as our current ones.

Your suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks

Hello, Lenny3

I appreciate that you have posted here, Well I would like to inform you that Using the drive for the configuration of RAID is a bit concern whether its data will be extracted or not after the RAID failure.

WD® Do recommend to use the same specification drive with the same RPM in order to create RAID configuration, Using 2 different drive with a different configuration may cause the RAID failure too frequently.
Moreover, as you said that you are using the RAID configuration on a Network(maybe NAS:- Network attached storage). WD® does have a RED drive for the network environment designed for multi-bay NAS systems with NASware 3.0 technology (Hardware based firmware)
Drive should have the ability to bear high temperature
PERFORMANCE CLASS
5400RPM Class 7200 RPM Class
24x7 NAS usage / write intense drives
Minimise vibration:
WD Red drives are designed “dual-plane balance control technology”
WD Red Pro drives also carry hardware vibration compensation for enterprise environment
Power consumption:
WD Red/Red Pro uses IntelliPower technology to optimize power consumption.

Eventually, You can have a look at the specs of the drive.
Here are the spec sheets for…

RED Drive
https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800002.pdf

Well, if we talk about the WD Gold drive it’s a data center drive, Enterprise-class storage to rely on with up to 2.5 million hours MTBF, WD Gold hard drives deliver reliability and durability, are built for yearly operation
(24x7x365) within the most demanding storage environments

Gold Drive.

So the WD GOLD drives are made to be ON 24/7 constantly spinning, but not made to spin down and for the computer to turn off E.C.T

im a gamer/ Heavy app installer/deleter
but i also dont want my drive to fail on me (i allways move my pc up and downstairs daily)
so what would you advise for me?
wd gold isnt worth it right?
wd purple? thats not made to turn off all the time, wd black is fast but less reliable

i mean this is my wd statistics since 2003-2005 when i first got the drive
is there any alarming smart readings here?

Hi Rocky.S
We are using RAID configured workstations used as human machine interfaces which are required to be running 24 x 7 in a control center and because they are running 24 x 7 we cannot stop the workstations to replace all of the HDDs so they can only be replaced when they become faulty.

why dont u use large ramdiscs