Both of those HDDs are native WD models.
The trend is that people buy SSDs for OS and booting, and HDDs for storage. You are bucking that trend. Personally, I upgraded my old machine (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz) with a 1TB SSD and have never looked back. The performance difference was enormous.
Yes, but why is it important if it’s WD native or HGST native? I mean where or when does this matter, and for whom? Is it a big difference? I don’t know anything about this. In fact, I didn’t know this was something they do, I didn’t know that WD rebadges and relabels their drives. Thanks for the info!
I ended up ordering the WD Red Plus, 4 TB. I know it’s not the best, but I’m sure it will get the job done, and do better in every aspect than my current WD Caviar Black drives.
Speaking of Caviar Black… just out of curiosity, do you have any info on who was bothered by “Caviar” in the name? Why are they all called WD Black, WD Red, WD Blue, WD Gold, and so on, but not WD Caviar Black, WD Caviar Red, WD Caviar Blue and WD Caviar Gold? What’s wrong with caviar? 
I think my first SSD was a Samsung 850 EVO, 250 GB, a SATA disk. That was a very good one! The best one I had I think. It was fast enough, stable and reliable, and maxing out the SATA 3 interface bus. It’s still in service in fact, but it has taken the back seat. Then I switched to Samsung 970 EVO Plus, 512 GB, an M.2 NVMe disk. That’s when it all went downhill for me as far as SSD disks go. It lasted just under 2 years and I had to replace it. I didn’t even take advantage of the 5 year warranty. I didn’t want to send it in. Instead, I bought a Samsung 980 PRO, 1 TB. I cloned the old one to the new one. But this too didn’t last me more than 2 years. So at the start of this month, I switched to WD Black SN850X for a change. I cloned the Samsung disk to the new WD disk. That’s what I’m currently booting off from.
I wasn’t buying just any cheap SSDs I could find, I always bought the very best ones, or whatever was the general consensus among PC builders/modders/overclockers, and in tests and reviews. Samsung disks are not cheap, but they are excellent… for as long as they work. I’m very disappointed that they are so short lived though. It’s not that they completely fail, but over time they become painfully slow, to the point where they are no longer usable. The wear leveling algorithm/mechanism is a joke, if there is one… and I’m not sure there is one.
No one talks about wear leveling, not anymore, and manufacturers certainly don’t advertise it. Why would they if it’s not to their advantage? Or am I just unlucky in the silicon lottery? I would really like to learn about the experience of others on this topic, but it seems like no one else is talking about it, everyone is blinded by blazingly fast read and write speeds. For as long as it works, that is. What good is speed if it’s not consistent and the disk is unreliable to store anything important on?
At least that’s my experience with SSDs. It’s part of the reason why I am not going to switch to all SSDs anytime soon. For long term storage, I keep turning to HDDs.
Caviar is a very old name. It was associated with the old IDE drives. Personally, I’ve never eaten caviar, nor would I want to eat fish eggs, so the name means nothing to me. As for why the name change, who knows how marketing people think.
Samsung had a bad run with their more recent SSDs. They were affected by bad NAND, AFAICT. The older 840 Evo also had bad NAND, but this was masked by updated firmware which pre-emptively refreshed decaying cells in the background.
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=42876
https://forum.acelab.eu.com/viewtopic.php?f=227&t=8735
WD has also had some duds (eg SA510, SanDisk externals).
Edit:
I’m not surprised that Samsung used sk Hynix memory in their phones.
Edit #2:
Currently the consensus among data recovery professionals is that HGST is the preferred brand in 3.5" drives.
You can see the reliability stats at BackBlaze.
As for why the name change, who knows how marketing people think.
Right you are! I rather naively thought for a second that they had a reason for the name change. It just seemed odd when I first noticed the change. It’s as if Microsoft changed its name to… Nanosoft? Or something. After 50 years.
Caviar is a very old name. It was associated with the old IDE drives. Personally, I’ve never eaten caviar, nor would I want to eat fish eggs, so the name means nothing to me.
Yeah, I think I still have an old 15 GB WD Caviar IDE drive stored away. And yes, same here, I have also never eaten caviar. I think the lesson in this is, you should never name a product after a food item, unless of course you’re in the food business. Perhaps that’s why they made the change.
I am personally not a big fan of the new color system either. What started out as only three colors has now grown into many colors. For example they have WD Purple for surveillance. How is that any different from all the rest? I have no idea. I don’t need to know. But I feel like they are watering it out too much, segmenting the product catalog too much and creating lots of confusion. They could also get creative with their naming, like in the old Caviar world. If there is WD Caviar, why not WD Cheese as well? Now that’s something I’m more than willing to bite into.
Thanks! I’m saving this for my afternoon reading session. But by the first look at it, I think I have been hanging out with the wrong crowd all this time. I am looking forward to read more about these SSD issues, and hopefully learn a thing or two that I can take home.
I’m not surprised that Samsung used sk Hynix memory in their phones.
Now I’m intrigued. Is this related to the topics at the links above? I honestly thought that Samsung played a trick on me when they included an SK Hynix UFS chip in my Galaxy S7 that died suddenly due to failed controller. But it sounds like I will have to re-evaluate that now.
Currently the consensus among data recovery professionals is that HGST is the preferred brand in 3.5" drives.
You can see the reliability stats at BackBlaze.
Now I can better appreciate your perspective. You’re in the data recovery business? I know I came across one article some months ago that talked about this amazing and unique data on disk/drive reliability that was collected by BackBlaze. But little did I know that BackBlaze has been publishing this kind of data since 2013. That’s really a treasure trove for gaining insights on reliability based on real world data. For a wider audience I mean. It’s nice of BackBlaze that they make this data accessible to everyone.
I’m not in the data recovery business. I’m just an interested observer.
I see. Well, you got me fooled! 
From one observer to another, let me just say that I would personally rather have one or two good observers than ten experts on my team. They have a good eye for details. I can’t find the word I’m looking for now but… their lack of expert status doesn’t get in the way of doing a good job, and giving honest advice. They are modest and honest.
I myself am what you might call a jack of all trades and expert of none… or not widely known and acclaimed, and I like it that way. I have a lot of interests and hobbies, but I never went deep on hard drive technology, even though I have always had an interest in storage in general because that’s where all the bits and bytes are stored, the all so important data without which computing is meaningless and wouldn’t be possible.
Anyways. I appreciate your input on all of this! I might take you up on the offer to do some experimenting on this hard drive, once I get the data off of it.
Master moron, you better calm down.
My attitude is that everybody knows something that I don’t know. These days there are no polymaths. Either you know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little, but most people, including me, just know a little about a little. There’s just too much to know.
In fact, in the data recovery business you’ll find that most people come from an IT background and have absolutely no knowledge about electronics. It really is scary. There is no official accreditation body, so everyone is self-taught. Anybody can just hang out a shingle and start touting their data recovery services. There is no official body to tell them that they’re not qualified.
Because, “I know that I know nothing”. That’s Socratic paradox. I sometimes cite or paraphrase this saying rather – because Socrates never said that, or at least not word for word. But in general, I think that’s a healthy approach to knowledge and learning.
The way you describe the data recovery business reminds me a lot of IT in general (or ICT, or “Tech” if you want to sound like you know more than you do).
I myself come from a background as an electrician. So I know a thing or two about electronics. I know it’s not exactly the same, for I know the difference between “electric” and “electronic”. I still remember the triangle cheat for Ohm’s law and Power equation. That has to count for something, right? I still know how to read color codes on regular resistors that are not SMDs. I was best in class in courses on electronics (basic theory, reading diagrams and symbols, and reading color codes, etc.) , digital circuits (logic gates, binary and hex, etc.), computer technology (PC hardware, build/teardown, troubleshoot, MS Windows, MS Office, etc.), and control technology (sensors, detectors, input, output, feedback… how elevators and escalators work, how petrol gauges and other gauges work, etc.).
I know a lot more than I can recall on the spot. Once I start doing the inventory of my mind. I know these things very broadly, I’m not an expert in any single field, I’m a generalist, always have been. But I will drill into whatever tickles my interest and curiosity. I learn on a need to know basis. You know… I will google it! I don’t even know how to translate to English half of the things I listed above, I had to google that. Before I had the Internet, I used to run tests and experimentally come to my own conclusions about things that were bugging me, usually some kind of tech problem. I do that even now, because the Internet is not always right.
More than anything, being an electrician taught me to have respect for current and voltage, to be careful, to think of safety first, to read the diagrams, to document what I work on so others can have the same benefit. I have never had an accident or caused any property damage.
I later moved into IT, but I’m currently unemployed and haven’t worked for a few years actually. I almost made it into data recovery at one point, because I’m a very driven problem solver. I was troubleshooting the SK Hynix problem I mentioned previously. It’s unusual that I don’t fix something I set my mind on. But this one got the better of me. So I was defeated, but I now have a solid foundation for a data recovery lab at my home. I also learned a lot in the process. But I don’t really want to take the next step and go in this direction, even though I know I would be very good at it. I have other plans.
As long as you have interest and passion for something, and you have some resources, and you have a functional mind and body, almost anything is possible. There’s no need for some kind of accreditation body for this type of work. That’s just capitalism at work.
I strongly believe that having limited resources is a precondition for creative and innovative work. This belief is confirmed every time I see what youngsters in places like India or Nigeria are learning and creating. Because of their often limited resources, they are forced to use their head more often than their age-equals in the so called “developed” countries (I live in one of these countries, but I was born and raised elsewhere). Thinking outside the box is their default state of mind, and not a seminar they have to attend to so they can blab about it on LinkedIn. Too much prosperity is not good. Too much of anything is not good. Buddha says… 
And I think Socrates would agree. 
You can have the latest “smartphone” with 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage, a 16 core processor running at 5.733 GHz, and not use it for anything more useful than sticking your tongue out to a camera and posting it on TikTok. 
Something that Albert Einstein might have done only when annoyed at paparazzis. It’s not that devices are getting “smarter”, it’s people that are getting “less smart” (more stupid) because they are not using their heads anymore. Using technology to fool around is not so bad in itself, when used in moderation. Technology should primarily be used to solve real world problems (e.g. transportation, and agriculture). One example of misuse can be found in this comment: using Unicode to encode emojis.
Most of the wisdom of Ancient Greeks, it’s in my blood and brain, I am Greek and I like to read lots of documents = source of knowledge.
Ancient Greeks passed to us and another golden advice.
Never use analytical though more than needed, because you will waste allot of time.
Second Gold advice, never do too much talking.
Since human life this is restricted due a time limit, all people they should waste their time by greatest caution.
I did deliver a good pack of short in length advices, a few community visitors will benefit from them.
I did a productive use of my time, and respected other people time too.
And all ancient Greek philosophers, if there were alive, they would agree too.
I am thankful to Western Digital engineers, the ones with a pile of earned certifications, no matter of their field of specialization, because their combined team work, it does deliver excellent products.
Since the year 2005 and up to date, for my professional workstation PC, I do not buy anything else than top class WD HDD.
WD Gold series this is today’s Top choice.
Retain the style of the general manager, only within the borders of your tiny blog.
In this web-space you are logged as plain WD customer.
In the next incident that you will get out of topic, I will report you, to the powers that be.
Graecus sum, ergo cogito, ergo sum.
Believe it or not, I was afraid you would read it this way when I mentioned Socrates… but I took that risk and kept that reference in the text. And see where it got us…
Dear Socrates, what documents have you read most recently?
First of all, not all ancient Greeks were philosophers. Who did the dishes if every Greek was occupied with philosophical questions? And that was not their advice to us. That was their mistake that we learned from and took advice from on our own, starting with Galileo Galilei and emperical evidence (natural science). If anyone, it was the ancient Greeks taht wasted a lot of time and exercised in analytical thinking, but only in thinking (natural philosophy).
Again, it was the anceint Greeks that did the talking, more than anyone. It’s well established that the church loved Aristotle for his simple, and often divine explanations of the world around him. It was easy to teach to others and it served the church well. So much so that his teachings and thinking continued to have a strong influence on education and poison the minds of young people in the christian Europe through Catechism, all the way up to late 1700s or so, some 1500 to 2000 years after his death.
I’m no expert on this topic, but fact is something I have a strong memory of from school, because I thought it was nuts how influential he was, Aristotle. I too very much liked his many ideas. It just shows how easily manipulated human beings are. So in a way, learning about this influenced my own beliefs and convictions about the world around me.
I looked it up just now, and yes, Catechism is a greek word for “to teach orally”, and it spells out as: κατηχέω. You can look it up on Wikipdeia.
This is something I can agree on. But I don’t need to read ancient history to know this. I saw an old movie once in my native language that has a great line that expresses the same idea. I will try to paraphrase it to English (I might need to edit this later). It goes something like this:
“In this world, only time has no price, and yet it has the highest value. Don’t run ahead of it, and don’t run behind it and it will be your best friend.”
Edited and complete version:
Only time has no price my son, and yet it’s worth more than anything. You have to learn to talk to it. You must not allow yourself to run ahead of it, and you must not run behind it. Don’t ever betray it, and it will be your best friend.
I still wonder what you were talking about when you wrote something about command sets, about use of older motherboards, and about sector sizes. I don’t know what you meant with most of what you wrote, and it’s not due to lack of intelligence or knowledge on my part. I have quoted you, opposed and questioned what you wrote, but you never responded.
I think your advices are well meant, but you are unable to express and articulate your thoughts and ideas, and obviously English is not your strong point. You also have a problem with your ego, having too much confidence in yourself.
That’s the problem. You need to waste more time working with your thoughts and ideas, before you write them down. I on the other hand, I need to do the opposite. As one professor once said, writing is thinking finalized. I’m a writer, and a thinker, and I know this very well.
Don’t just barge in and write a few improper sentences in broken English that don’t make any sense, and then run away. Put in some effort please. First of all, so I can understand what you’re saying. After that follows respect for your knowledge and appreciation for your advice(s).
Don’t flatter yourself!
This is so cringy! You’re embarrassing yourself and everyone around you. I once had a frined like this. He was from Macedonia (the independent country, and not part of Greece). He often put himself in these situations and everyone laughed at him, not with him, for making some silly comment and such.
This is absolute nonsense, and it adds no merit to any of your arguments. Apply for a job at WD, why don’t you? You would fit right in. Then you can all do the “team work” dance.
That’s fine. I have no problem with that. You can buy whatever you want, or whatever is available to you. I tried to locate a WD Gold drive with 2 TB capacity, but I could not find it in any of the local computer stores in my country, and I didn’t want to order from Amazon or eBay and so on. I get so much better customer service from domestic stores than any of these American shopping sites, and our technology is far superior than anything I’ve seen from Amazon or eBay, or WD Store.
In fact, I have a support ticket with WD regarding their loss of my recent order records, since 2017. Meanwhile, with my favorite computer store, I have records going back to 2003, including old product pages, with full technical specifications, no broken links, with images and so on, and they all link back to each order.
The company I regularly buy from knows the true value of record keeping and investing in IT and infrastructure for smooth operations. They knew this from early on, because it’s a company run by nerds/overclockers/gamers and they serve their own kind. At least that’s how it started, but they see many kinds of buyers these days. They are without doubt the most successful computer store in the country, and one of the longest running. They are not alone either, we have at least three more almost equally successful companies in this category. But the one I most often buy from, they have won most of the yearly trophies that are awarded by shoppers/customers/consumers across the online shopping space, per category.
I have free delivery with them, free return, 30 day return policy, excellent customer service that knows what the hell I’m talking about if I call in or have a live chat with them. Why would I ever order from Amazon or eBay? Only if I really want something that I can’t find anywhere else.
So I ended up buying a WD Red Plus 4 TB from them and I’m perfectly happy with it. No, it’s not a WD Gold. But why would it have to be? Because of some enterprise features or command sets? I think I’ll be fine without those. I will take my chance.
I’ve had a similar issue with older drives making strange noises during heavy tasks like file comparisons. The sound difference you’re noticing between larger and smaller files seems pretty typical of how drives handle sequential vs. random reads. Bigger files tend to be smoother since the heads don’t have to move around much, but smaller files can cause more erratic movement. If the noise gets worse or you start noticing slowdowns, it might be time to back up your stuff and consider replacing the drive. Running a health check with something like CrystalDiskInfo could give you a clearer picture of its condition.
| Forums | News and Announcements | Register | Help | Forum Guidelines |
Copyright © 2021 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All rights
reserved.
|
Trademarks
|
Privacy
|
Community Terms of Service
|
Site Terms of Use
|
Copyright
|
Contact WD
|