AV Series or classic Desktop Series for Audio Editing?

After recently finding out about the Western Digital AV series of drives, I am stuck trying to decide which drive would be best for what I need.

The AV series is advertised as being for audio and video use, yet all of the descriptions and information about them slant heavily towards them being used as video drives, for tivo’s, xboxes, and dvr’s, with rarely any mention of professional audio implementation.

I am a musician who needs a drive that won’t overheat after some serious high bitrate recording. I’ve run into issues of my regular WD drive overheating after prolonged use; resulting in randomly lost data and corrupt or inacessable directories to which I have found no remedy. The AV series sounds like it was designed to take this kind of a challenge on, and so I have been looking at the product line.

My main concern is that I keep reading how people say the AV drives are a bad idea to use as the main boot drive and for general use. The problem there is that I need the boot drive to also be the drive that is under pressure and extreme use, due to several factors; I only have one 3. 5" drive bay in my audio workstation, and the programs that I use need to have the ‘scratch disk’ (i.e. where the audio is coming in and being temped out to) to also be the main drive itself as well.

So what is the best way to go about this? Having the limitation of only a single hard drive for the system, which is best? Getting an AV drive and possibly having poor operating speeds, or getting a WD Black drive and basically overheating it with the hopes that it will hold out?

We would never recommend the AV drives for system drives.  You should consider cooling your room more, or putting more fans in your pc.  If the drive is overheating, it may be because it’s not getting enough air.  If you’re losing data on the drive, you may want to consider using our diagnostic utility to check the drive for imminent failure.  You could consider getting a green drive.  They’re designed to run cooler.