I just had a HD partition turn RAW on me for no reason and decided it’s time to refresh my systems internal storage.
I’ve always purchased Western Digital Black drives, the ones in my machine are all easily over 5 years old.
Now as I was about to press BUY on amazon for 2 x 2TB + 1 x 1TB + 1 x 4TB Western Digital Blacks, I noticed Western Digital Gold… I know this is an enterprise drive but it’s documented to be more reliable etc. The reviews I found online are all from June the 5th 1802 and can’t find any mention of anyone using them and reviewing them for desktop non raid use.
They are the same price as the Western Digital Black, and the data they will store is 90% work related.
So my question is would you recommend I purchase the Gold over the Black? Please note I will never be using them in a RAID setup.
NOTE:
WD Black have a 5 year warranty
WD Gold have a 5 year warranty
WD Gold and Black are nearly identical in price for all matching sizes
My setup is like this and the new drives will replicate this also:
SSD - Windows & Work software - 1TB (keeping)
SSD - Ubuntu - 500GB (keeping)
I think the WD Gold drives have a better warranty than the Black. That was the deciding factor for me when I bought a pair of 4TB Gold drives around April/May last year. All OK so far.
I use them in a Linux md raid config myself. One interesting thing is they report a 512byte native sector size, rather than a 4k native sector which the desktop drives report.
Golds will support TLER for hardware RAID, while Blacks don’t. If you were to RAID 1 anything, Gold is the automatic choice. Purely the only difference is the firmware supports hardware RAID better.
I’ve had too many Seagate drives fail on me to ever try or trust them again.
I’ve got a Western Digital drive in my machine (Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD5001AALS)) which was bought in 2009, is still in active daily use and works fine. I bought 3 seagate drives for my system HD update in 2014 and I broke all 3 seagate drives copying the data from that 1 Western Digital drive to them (0.5tb to 1tb) lol.
Oddly I’ve just completed a sector scan of the WD Black 2TB Drive that had the partition just suddenly switch to RAW and it’s fine.
But none the less all the drives are very old and it’s time for an update.
So, I’ve decided to stick with what I know and trust with the Western Digital Black drives.
It’s such a crap shoot with Seagate really. I might consider them if i know they wont be plugged in 24/7. I personally perfer the WD Black, but for 24/7 use the RED/Purple are the best. the TLER feature is a must.
NAS/RAID-optimized drives for redundant storage systems (WD Gold, Red).
Desktop drives when using them standalone or in RAID 0 (WD Black).
In face of read errors, drives intended for RAID or NAS systems will give up early, report an error, and allow the redundant system to retrieve the data from another place or from parity. This makes sure the whole disk isn’t dropped off the array due to hanging / the controller thinking it has died.
Wenn it comes to HDD´s its really a matter of luck imo.
Of course there some data to be find about failure rates of hdds in enterprise world.
But again based on those numbers, Seagate doesnt really seem to score that well in failure rates.
But how much does that tell me?
I had good and bad experiance with both WD and Seagate drives for that matter.
I would say, just pick a drive based on your planned configuration and use case scenario.
WD Blacks are decent drives for standalone typical storage.
Even the WD Blue’s 7200rpm drive are fine for just Home use stand alone storage.
But if you are looking for drives that 24/7 do data read and writing or advanced raid setups.
Then maybe a WD Gold enterprise drive might be worth concidering.
WD RED´s are nice drives for Home Nas solutions.
HGST drives also seem to be pretty sollid from what i have heard.
Or atleast i think that @wendell really likes HGST drives.
The thing is, I don’t run a RIAD but I do have the machine on 24x7, it’s very rare it has a night powered down as it is constantly serving web services and cloud syncing at night what has changed in the day.
I was tempted to try the HGST drives as I’ve heard they are supposedly the most reliable of all.
I’ve never used golds but they are enterprise so are rated for 24/7 and higher hours till failure. Not using Raid is fine just make sure you have a backup, preferable off site and preferably in some sort of fireproof enclosure. Besides the usual reasons for not having all of the data backed up in once place (fire, flood, surge etc) Think about what would happen if you got hit with ransom ware (remember wannacry?). It won’t matter that all of your data is backed up on an additional hard drive if it’s encrypted.
That’s why I do a cloud sync every night, so worst case scenario I loose 1 day of work. There’s only 1 drive that is critical in my list (the 1tb apache, mysql, maria), the rest can fail and be lost and I wouldn’t really mind much. 90% of it is live on various hosts and the whole thing is cloud synced each night as well as fully backed up on the backup hd.
But if I did get ransom wared loosing the 1TB apache and the 2TB backup drives AND if the cloud sync failed I would just format all and start again, god would I love to start with clean drives but can’t lol.
Might be worth a look. These tests are kind of difficult cause conditions with testing can really vary. That being said, anything after 5 years is questionable and is essentially on ‘borrowed time.’
I’ve had better luck with HGSTs in my time, besides one that got dropped (which can kill any drive, no matter the brand). Or the drives that started to fail, HGSTs are also the best I’ve had for data recovery.
I don’t have anything to say about WD golds (cause I’ve never used one), but the WD Blacks I’ve had were fairly decent. They lasted quite a while before finally calling it quits. The WD blues are just as bad as Seagate drives- they’re cheap for a reason. Most of the Seagate drives I’ve used haven’t made it to the 5 year mark. The WD blacks I’ve used didn’t make it much past the 5 year mark, but that is about what I would expect for any drive.
I’m happy that you have a strategy for this. There has been a lot of good information floating around in this thread. You should have enough to make your decision. Good luck with whatever you decide!
Id grab a couple of WD reds if so, they’re stable albeit not the fastest hare in the race.
I’m using 2 for my NAS, they lasted a couple of years, without even a hickup.
And these drives are designed specifically for 24/7 read/write, not to mention they’re quite cheap.
So unless you’re looking for top notch performance.
Got my WD Blacks now and if anyone is interested here’s the structure / setup I am now running (slightly modified from my previous way (see opening post)).
The reason there are so many drive partitions is because when you loose a partition, more often than not the other partitions on that drive remain intact and functional where as if you put everything into folders on a single partition and loose that partition there’s a good chance its all gone. So this is a pre-disaster control feature.
As for having separate drives for resources, programs, windows etc, this limits the grind on any one drive and can help to give drives a longer life and lessen the chance of failures. When I do get failures it’s often just on the program files and desktop partitions.
So here’s my active new setup:
SSD - 1TB - Windows & Priority program files only
SSD - 0.5TB - Ubuntu
WDB 2TB HD - Partitioned to:
Windows mapped Desktop - 250GB
Windows mapped Documents (junk for software installs) - 50GB
Windows mapped Pictures - 50GB
Windows mapped videos - 250GB
Programs (steam, non essential programs etc) - (allocate remaining)GB
WDB 2TB HD - Partitioned to:
Music 500GB
Software - 150GB
[dir] software
[dir] hardware (drivers etc)
Resources - 750GB
[dir] Resources: pictures
[dir] Resources: textures
[dir] Resources: videos
[dir] Resources: samples
[dir] Resources: programming
[dir] Resources: 3D
etc
Storage - (allocate remaining)GB
WDB 1TB HD - Partitioned to:
Apache, HTDOCS, MySQL & Maria - 800GB
Documents - (allocate remaining)GB
[dir] Work
[dir] Personal
WDB 2TB HD - Partitioned to:
Backups - 1.5TB (For htdocs, mysql & maria db folders)
Archive - (allocate remaining)GB (compressed work folders of old)
Cloud Sync:
Resources
HTDocs, MySQL & Maris DB folders
- WARNING: Google Drive can’t handle backing this up (too many files), even tried writing my own software using the Google Drive API, really poor API, heavily throttled to 1000 results at a time, making syncing directory structures a time costly task alone! Best to cloud sync the actual backup files from the backup harddrive instead of the uncompressed and consolidated files and folders
- Many items within are synced with GITHub
