My question is as these are designed to be used in a NAS are they going to be alright in a standard ish build being powered on and off.
Also I must mention it'll be an AMD FX8350 CPU 990 chipset build, does anyone have any knowledge or experience with these or other larger capacity drives on this platform?
AFAIK the reds (not the red Pro's) are exactly the same like "normal" drives but with better firmware to prevent vibrations if you mounted 5 drives and a bit of other stuff mlike better work with raid-controller. So it will be fine (i think. I just have one german source for this information, so handle with care). And i got a friend that uses them in his desktop without problems (the greens died all very soon).
I do not have any Reds of that high capacity the largest ones I have are 2TB, and all of mine run 24/7 so i can not say for powering on and off. but they have been going for over 2 years in my nas and server. the server is just one 1TB red on a i7 870 so not really a server per say but more of a desktop that's on 24/7 and doing stuffs.
Hard drive platters, in drives from all companies, are by and large made by the same fabrication plants in Asia. The plants sell the platters in batches with certain failure rates. Some failure rates are acceptable by some companies for some products. When the platters are stacked and combed and mounted in the drive enclosure, some companies also do extended burn-in testing. So you get this situation where the actual quality of the hardware is better in these drives. Also, the more closely you stack the platter, the higher the failure rate. This is why you are better off with two 2-TB drives rather than one 4-TB.
So a higher quality NAS drive is going to have a lower failure rate on a physical level, but it's also going to have other features that make it better for its intended use-case. Some of these may be at a software level, some at a hardware level, but they may not really be useful for what you are doing in a single drive setup. Whether or not the added features are worth your while, is up to you. A WD Black might be a better choice.
While this is true, it's also true that HGST drives are not WD drives, they are really Hitachi GST drives which is the company WD bought out the drive division for 4.8b.
So.....your going to put that much storage in your desktop PC? Do you have a backup solution you plan on using?
The info @blaxa posted is important and in a desktop environment that's a lot of data to trust to not only your daily driver but the drives, my point is that if I was going to store that amount of data I'd build a NAS with some type of redundancy to protect the data, it can get awfully painful to start loosing data in 3tb or 4tb chunks with no plan/solution to rebuild the data. A lot of HD's fail withing the first 30-90 days right when your feeling comfortable that everything is ok and safe.
But in the end it really comes down to just how important the data is and to what lengths you would have to go to replace it, if it's not important then it's not a issue. If it is important or the hours it would take to replace it are very high I'd want the data isolated from my main OS, and residing somewhere with some built in redundancy to lessen my risk.
Go for it. They will behave no differently and Will most likely last longer than most other competetive drives because of their longer warranty and NAS design. that being said they're not going to be fast like a black but they're get the job done. and done well.
The raided 500GB 850 evos should manage all the speed I need, just need super mass storage and reaction to these puppies is much better than my previously planned seagates!!
Another silly question is there an effective way of setting up 1tb of one of the WDs as a partition to use as a back up for the raid? Without it taking years to write new data with every backup?
