Geezer1984 wrote:
One caveat: The previous post gave me the impression that the poster was considering the red and green drives potentially application-equivalent except possibly for sound and price -- they are not! WD clearly states that the red drives are designed and intended for NAS on-all-the-time applications, NOT for use in a PC on-and-off environment. WD advises that repeated on-off use will result in greatly degraded drive life, due to landing-zone wear, etc. The green drives, on the other hand, are intended for PC use in situations where energy use is a significant consideration.
For performance-critical mass storage in-PC applications, you might want to consider the WD2003FYYS, which is an enterprise-grade 2 TB, 7200 rpm, 64 Mb cache SATA-300 drive, ruggedized for commercial use, and including special mechanics which prevent the r/w heads from EVER contacting the platters, even at full stop. I have one of these sitting in a SATA cradle abt 2 feet from my left ear; I can barely hear it, even during defrag runs. A little careful shopping can deliver you one of these (as a white-label, bulk-pack, 1 yr guarantee) for a C-note or a bit more.
Thanks for good feedback.
I run a 3TB green drive in a 5.25" scythe quiet drive silencing enclosure and it is far from inaudible - at least not in a small living room at night. It would be perfect to find drives that are inaudible. For now I have to move the storage to another room. I was thinking of stacking couple of drives in silencing enclosures and connecting them with a SATA port multiplier (e.g.
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad5esapm-e.php), then converting to USB so that I can make a long cable connection. Bandwidth doesn't matter because I store music and movies mainly. I have no use for RAID solutions because I don't see its benefits in this case. RAID would make all my drives run and produce noise, draw electricity, make them more susceptible to failure, and RAID can't really serve as backup because it is simply not.
The only problem is that I can't find an enclosure for multiple drives with 5.25" bays. I really like this silencing enclosure because it really makes the drive very quiet. I guess I will have to build my own case and connect the drives with the SATA multiplier.
I can put all data on some drives that won't need to be backed up regularly because the data doesn't change. I greatly use the spin down feature because I need some disks spinning only when I watch a movie which is like 2 hours a day. For this purpose it would be ideal to just stay with the green line for everything and keep one RED drive spinning 24/7 for torrents and stuff that gets read or written often.
It is very interesting topic you started about the RED drives being only good for operation without spinning up/down the drives. The question is how much risk of failure there is spinning it down more often. Any detailed information would be welcome.
7200RPM drives seem just useless for anything I can think of in a home environment. One fast SSD seems just enough, or (subjectively) soon will be when the price of 500GB gets cut down to half.
I plan on rebuilding my whole HTPC, workstation, server ecosystem based on just one haswell rig (i need low idle power because this thing must run 24/7). It will be a mITX fanless computer in a streacom case that would do everything running multiple virtual machines with hypervisor (I hope its not just my wishful thinking that I can virtualize everything - I will probably have to add another graphics card outputting to my TV for example and of course gaming is not possible with this right now).