WD Red/Seagate Ironwolf are worth it?

Zitat von tkaiser

That's what people talk about the WD Blue the thread starter was talking about: https://community.wd.com/t/wdi…ue-drives-any-help/193353

WD Greens were set to park after 5 seconds idle time. By comparison, Reds are set to park after 300 seconds idle.

There were some quality control issues with Reds some time back, and a number of them shipped with the 5 second setting (as some folks have noted). This caused them to die in no time as NAS/low end server drives, and led to some conspiracy theories online that Reds and Greens were both the same, except for firmware settings and warranty.

"5400 RPM Class Blue" replaced Greens recently (at least in the US), and they also had the 5 second head parking. However, my most recently purchased Blue drive had parking set to 300, and not 5.

According to the internet, the latest generation drives won't work with WDIDLE3. WDIDLE3 wouldn't work on mine when I tested it, so I don't have reason to doubt that is true. I have found that idle3-tools on linux did work to manage firmware settings on my newer WD drives, where WDIDLE3 did not. This was just my experience, I can't guarantee it will work on all WD drives. It seems to me, in just my limited experience with WD, that there's some inconsistency in firmware settings from drive to drive, so there's no telling what will and won't work. I suppose there's a reason why those cost less and enterprise grade cost more, and you usually get what you pay for!

Zitat von Markess

warranty

Well, I already elaborated on why warranty is one of the most important criteria for me.

To summarize the WD situation:

• Nobody knows which head parking settings he gets when buying a WD disk prior to purchase. Can be 8 seconds, can be 300, might be changeable, might not. If set to low the disk might die relatively fast.
• WD Blue: 2 years warranty
• WD Green: 3 years warranty
• WD Red: 3 years warranty
• WD Red Pro: 5 years warranty

Seriously: which use cases are those WD Blue made for? To be thrown away just after two years?

Zitat von Markess

you usually get what you pay for!

Exactly. And of course HDDs with a longer warranty period cost a little bit more...

I worked with pro,and it's okay if you use encryption for the pool(QNAP in this case). There is a serious penalty with encryption ,and you sometimes need faster drives.

Zitat von Blabla

WD Blue -> consumer, normal use
WD Green -> Not sure where you live, but in EU and USA they're not sold anymore.
WD Red -> NAS
WD Red Pro -> NAS too, but they cost 50€ more than normal Red
WD Enterprise -> Storage for server (One my friend gifted me 4 of this one, that's why I know them)

Seriously. I'm not interested in how WD's marketing department positions their drives. I don't buy WD anyway and as such I'm not affected by their pricing strategies or how their marketing folks made up their product portfolio.

If I need a new disk for personal usage I use a database and filter for my criteria (24/7 operation and 5 years warranty as a starting point, sorted by 'price per TB'):

• SATA: https://geizhals.de/?cat=hde7s…E960_5&sort=r#productlist
• SAS: https://geizhals.de/?cat=hde7s…~960_5&sort=r#productlist

Then it depends on storage topology and use case...

For commercial projects it's the contractors choice. In the past they used also HGST but within the last 10 years I can't remember seeing anything other than Seagate.