Best WD HD for Home Theater

[BeardedMisfit]

I’m looking to build a home theater system with WD Hard drives, but I’m unsure whether to use Green, Blue, Red, or Red Pro. I have the Silverstone R03 case that holds 10x 3.5" drives. I’m new to this and looking for any helpful feedback.

Thanks very much.

[Joerg_A]

If you plan to have more drives in a RAID, consider to use WD Red (recommended for RAIDs up to 8 drives) or WD Red Pro (recommended for RAIDs with up to 16 drives).

The drive for operating system and programs should be a WD Black - or a SSD for OS and a WD Black for the programs.

[BeardedMisfit]

Recommended size black for OS and programs? Won’t be many programs at all.

[Joerg_A]

Recommended size? Difficult to give any recommendations regarding sizes.
For making use of all the 8 bays below, you should consider a good hardware RAID controller

My choice is:

SSD: at least 250 or 256 GB, these models are really fast; faster than 128 GB versions.
HDD: 1 TB should be fine for OS and a bunch of programs.
RAID: RAID 10 gives 50% overall, RAID 5 gives N drives - 1 drive, RAID 6 gives N drives - 2 drives

Calculation by using all 10 bays

Bay 1: SSD for OS
Bay 2: HDD for programs

8 bays left for RAID storage (all 8 drives has to be the same capacity)

RAID 10 on 8 bays = capacity of 4 drives available
RAID 5 : 7 drives for capacity, one drive for parity
RAID 6 : 6 drives for capacity, two drives for parity

WD Black starts at 500 GB up to 6 TB.
WD Red is available from 1 TB to 6 TB

[mike27oct]

All good info and advice, but to keep things simple, get a WD NAS for storing all media files on. Media will easily be available for home theater, all mobile devices and computers in home, as well as be accessible away from home.

I suggest the DL series of My Cloud NAS, either DL2100 or DL4100, and get one that is pre-configured with the quantity and TB size of WD Red (NAS) drives for your current and possible future needs. (Example, my DL2100 has two, 4TB RED drives configured in RAID 1 array.)

If you need drives to run the home theater OS innards, quality, fast WD Black drives likely would do a great job.