Choosing new drive: red or black?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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Hi -

I need a new drive for my home system. I’ve red the product recommendations for the WD Red and Black, and am not sure which is best. My system is a Mac Mini. It has a small internal SSD for the OS, and all my account data is on an external drive mounted in a Stardom ST2, connected by Firewire.

So…it’s not truly an NAS (which is what the Red seems to be for), but it’s not an internal drive either. Can someone help me decide which is best for my use?

Thanks.

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mzimmers wrote:

Hi -

 

I need a new drive for my home system. I’ve red the product recommendations for the WD Red and Black, and am not sure which is best. My system is a Mac Mini. It has a small internal SSD for the OS, and all my account data is on an external drive mounted in a Stardom ST2, connected by Firewire.

 

So…it’s not truly an NAS (which is what the Red seems to be for), but it’s not an internal drive either. Can someone help me decide which is best for my use?

 

Thanks.

Do you have a list of compatible specs like maximum RPM, drive size, cache and interface? The drives may not even be compatible, so without that info anything would be a blind guess.

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The Stardom site is pretty light on specs, but they do state that any 3.5” SATA III HDD ( up to 3 Gbps ) will work. I’m already running a WD Green in there, and it seems fine.

I’m more interested in what exactly makes the Red more suitable for NAS devices. If its high availability, then that’s probably not really important to me. If there’s something about it that makes it work better than other discs in an external enclosure, then I would be interested.

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Hi when you say any 3.5” SATA III HDD ( up to 3 Gbps ) 3Gbps is sata 2 not sata 3 sata 3 is 6Gbps. The Red drives have what they call time-limited error recovery (TLER) this is used in raid setups. In a external enclosure you need to worry about heat if the enclosure does not have a fan so a slower drive would run cooler the Red drive would run at around 31c the black drive would run around 39c but with no fan to cool it using the drive to copy 1 tb of data to would make it hotter than 39c it may even hit 50 c. So I would say the Red drive would give longer more stable use.

2 Likes
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Thanks, Hammey…I’m pretty sure the Stardom has a cooling fan, so I don’t imagine heat would be a major issue. But you bring up a good point that I can’t take advantage of a SATA III interface; that’s good to keep in mind.

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Hi yes so the thing is to find out from Stardom will the sata controller in the case recognize a sata 3 drive if it runs sata 2 mode it should find a sata 3 drive… At times some sata controller’s will fail to find a sata 3 drive so that is one thing to make sure of. If so and you have a fan the black drive would be faster and has the same 5 year warranty as the Red. I notice on the stardom case some have a switch on the back to run Raid 0 if yours does and you may want to use it in the future and buy another drive the same the Red drive would be the way to go. So it is mainly what you want to use it for single drive black but if you ever want to run Raid go with the Red.

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That’s exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks, Hammey.