Hello Community
I have been thinking to buy 2 WD Black HDD’s ( WD2003FZEX) to setup raid 1 or may be 4 HDD’s for raid 10…
Please let me know if the disk’s will support the raid levels or do you suggest me to choose WD Red
Hi the black drive’s are not meant for raid they don’t support time-limited error recovery (TLER). So the red drive’s would be more dependable as they are designed for Raid.
Given that you are looking at blacks (over blues or greens), you might be more interested in the WD Raid Edition Drives. They are one of the performance raid drives (as opposed to slower bulk storage). Or maybe look at WD SE too.
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I see that Raid edition(WD Re) are not 7200 RPM instead all the models are intellipowered… So Do I go with WD Se?
Hi of course the SE or re drive’s are much better drive’s but . Wd SE 3 tb = 214 $ Wd Red 3tb = 139 $. So it is up to you, myself I do not use cheap drive’s. If you don’t mind the cost increase for performance and durability go with the SE.
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All of the RE drives are 7200 RPM:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=580
Personally I think I’d just go with SE for any sort of home performance system. I use Reds in my NAS and can read/write at 480MB/s to those arrays, but there’s a bottleneck of a bit over 100MB/s from the gigabit lan. Really just depends on what sort of performance you’re after an dif you’re prepared to pay for it.
There is of course WD XE drives too, they are 10k RPM, 2.5 inch drives, which are the SAS equivalent of velociraptors. But they’re rediculously expensive.
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Red, Black, Yellow, Green, RE, SE, XE, etc…Is there an online chart or table that denotes the proper/intended usages so one can make proper selections? What do “RE”, “SE”, and “XE” mean?
Additionally, are these different DESIGNS, just indicators of overall quality, or a combination?
If you go back to the wd homepage and internal storage it breaks it down into categories like desktop/workstation, NAS etc. If you go to those pages the drive models are broken down further. Therer are raid and non-raid models, in general it’s a bad idea to use non-raid drives in raid. You can use raid drives non-raid without too much problem though, although in the event of a bad sector the drive won’t try as hard to recover your data (they are relying on being in raid and having that raid there to supply the data instead).
Red have TLER on but are slower spindle speed, 5400RPM I think. Home RAID where you don’t need blazing performance. Keep in mind with a 5 disk x 2TB RAIDZ5 of these disks you still get about 450-500MB/s.
Black are non-raid performance drives for OS.
Velociraptors are 10k 2.5 inch SATA drives for very high performance non-raid home computers and workstations. I think you can run a tool to flick these suckers over into RAID mode (turn on TLER).
Green are non-raid bulk storage, slower spindle and not made for 365/24/7 on time.
SE Scalability Enterprise are 7200RPM drives for higher performance bulk storage RAID. COme in SAS too I think,
XE (eXtreme Enterprise?) are 10k RPM 2.5 inch SAS drives for very high performance RAID.
RE Eaid Edition, 7200 RPM general higher performance RAID. Come in SATA and SAS.
In general you can probably judge quality by the warranty period, although real world failure rates tend to show consumer and enterprise drives have about the same failure rate. The NAS/RAID drivces do have mechanisms for less vibration though, and say using green drives in a raid is just asking for drives to fail (I’ve done it myself years ago when the only other option was RE drives costing 80% more),
VR’s do have TLER, they are enterprise grade drives.
“It’s important to note that the fundamental design of VelociRaptor remains unchanged – still has TLER, RAFF, other enterprise-like robustness - and maintains many of the same specs as the previous generation.”
