WD "Red" drives? At Newegg.

[Binky]

Reviews and stars are pretty close to irrelevant. How many people do you think go back to review a working product? I'd imagine it is MUCH lower percentage than the people who have problems.

 

[thelastjuju]

Reviews and stars are pretty close to irrelevant. How many people do you think go back to review a working product? I'd imagine it is MUCH lower percentage than the people who have problems.

It IS definitely much lower, you're right... but what you and everyone who make that same argument (for why newegg reviews are irrelevant) forget is that the same deal applies to ALL products... and so when this doesn't happen, its definitely a good sign, is it not?

There are plenty of hard drives (and other electronics in general) that DO NOT have outrageous or disproportional amounts of people coming back to rate it as low as they can.. and those are the drives/products I want. :thumbsup:

Newegg reviews are not 100% accurate, but to take them with but a grain of salt is a huge mistake. I avoid all products that have inordinate amounts of poor ratings..

That said, these red drives don't have nearly enough ratings to get a good read on them yet.

 

[ronbo613]

Reviews and stars are pretty close to irrelevant. How many people do you think go back to review a working product? I'd imagine it is MUCH lower percentage than the people who have problems.

People are more likely to complain about problems than write positive reviews, for sure. If you know that and look for trends in the negative reviews, you might get something out of it.
That being said, since I read newegg reviews before purchasing anything, I try to take the time to review products, good or bad, because you get to the point where you can tell somebody is ranting or providing an accurate product assessment, and having no reviews would be worse.

 

[bryanW1995]

Newegg reviews can be helpful when there are enough of them, the problem is when you only have a couple it's not statistically significant. Generally in that case I look at similar products released in the past by the same company.

 

[poohbear]

quick question, would the WD Reds be more reliable than the WD Blacks because they're rated to run 24/7 for 3 years warranty, whereas the WD blacks are 5 years warranty but for day to day use (not 24/7)? I understand for WD it doesnt matter, its a 3 year warranty vs 5 year warranty, but are the Reds more reliable because the 3 year warranty takes into account they'll be running 24/7, whereas the 5 year warranty for Blacks don't take this into account?

 

[Red Squirrel]

There's a thread on [H] about these. Some guys ordered a whole bunch and had tons of DOAs. I'd personally stay away for now at least until the issues get ironed out. They do sound like a great concept though, but still too new I guess.

I'm sure their factory equipment is also not 100% tweaked since the flood, I imagine it takes quite a lot of production runs to get everything right again. But any drive being used in a NAS should be stress tested for a while ahead of time anyway, so you can probably still buy a bunch, run them through stress testing, return the DOAs and continue on until they're all good and show no smart errors or signs of failure.

 

[ViRGE]

WHS V1 doesn't work properly with advanced format drives. The WD drives work fine when they are jumpered. I'd assume these red drives have the same jumper system.

Actually, that's a fantastic question. I just got a 2TB Red back as an RMA. There aren't any instructions on the label, however it does have the same pins as a Green. So I guess I'll have to find out.

 

[greenhawk]

The 3 year warranty does not make any sense. Wouldnt you want a 5 year warranty for drives that perform this function?

they probably do not want to interfere with the Green "AV-GP" range of drives.

 

[greenhawk]

i wonder if apple will put these in their time capsules now. they advertise the time capsule as having a 'server grade' drive, yet when you crack it open, it's a WD Green.

the RE4-GP is ment to be server grade but is still a green drive.

 

[ViRGE]

Actually, that's a fantastic question. I just got a 2TB Red back as an RMA. There aren't any instructions on the label, however it does have the same pins as a Green. So I guess I'll have to find out.

So good news.

It looks like jumping pins 7-8 on a Red drive will apply a sector offset, just like it does on WD's Green drives.

I installed the 2TB Red this evening, and before adding it to the drive pool ran some sequential write tests on it with both CrystalDiskMark and IOMeter. Both are showing 90MB+.

On a side note, it's also possible to disable TLER using the WDTLER utility.

 

[Old Hippie]

it's also possible to disable TLER using the WDTLER utility.

Did they put the utility back on the WD site?

 

[ViRGE]

Did they put the utility back on the WD site?

Not that I'm aware of. I had to grab it from another site.

 

[Old Hippie]

Not that I'm aware of. I had to grab it from another site.

I have WDTLER.zip on RS if anyone is interested.

 

[Husky55]

Judging from the speeds (145MB/s) I guess they have 1TB platters, which is nice if they are reliable. Unlike these WD Reds, Seagate's 1TB platter HDDs look terrible for reliability since they are said to be not rated for 24/7 operation.

I just bought 3 of the Seagate 3 TB drives for my server (ST3000DM001). I had hoped that their reliability would be as good as WD green drive since they have 1 TB platters. I noticed that the Seagate drives are only warrantied for 1 year.

 

[ViRGE]

I just bought 3 of the Seagate 3 TB drives for my server (ST3000DM001). I had hoped that their reliability would be as good as WD green drive since they have 1 TB platters. I noticed that the Seagate drives are only warrantied for 1 year.

Everyone's baseline drives are like that now. They set their warranties back to 1 year after the flood.

 

[Husky55]

I am on a budget so I bought the Seagates because they are relatively cheap. I had used the WD green for my server previously with no problem, Would the RED WD be much better for a server? WD is pricier than Seagate.

I do have redundancy in my server so if a drive fail, I can replace it with no loss of data.

 

[BFG10K]

Everyone's baseline drives are like that now. They set their warranties back to 1 year after the flood.

Not true, WD retained 2 years minimum on all drives. They never reduced the 5 years on Blacks or Raptors either.

Seagate has the poorest warranties given some of their drives dropped from 5 years to 1 year.

 

[Emulex]

anyone here know if the new velociraptor is enterprise or not?

the old style came in consumer and enterprise (TLER).

Just curious what ye says on the new 1TB models?

 

[ericloewe]

anyone here know if the new velociraptor is enterprise or not?

the old style came in consumer and enterprise (TLER).

Just curious what ye says on the new 1TB models?

I think it was the same drive, just with a different label (and perhaps without the heatsink). All I've seen have the enterprise label.

 

[Blain]

"Enterprise" quality or higher (inflated)MTBF hard drives are marketing at it's best.
Real world study suggest they fail more often than their cheaper consumer-level buddies.

I've never heard anything like this... Got any links?

 

[n0x1ous]

FWIW, this week I received my order of 4 -3TB Red's for my new Server (running Server 2012 Essentials Beta at the moment) and they are all working well - very quiet and good performance. Happy with them so far. Time will tell obviously on the reliability front

 

[rsutoratosu]

I've never heard anything like this... Got any links?

Me either, my crap load of Enterprise SAS/SCSI drives are still working for over 5 years. SCSI at 8-10 years. I haven't rma an enterprise drive for a long time but over 20-30 sata/desktop drives in the past 2 year

 

[Old Hippie]

I've never heard anything like this... Got any links?

Just add Andle Riddum in the same catagory as tweakboy and forget about it.

 

[bryanW1995]

Just add Andle Riddum in the same catagory as tweakboy and forget about it.

I think that you just went from zero to "ludicrous speed" in no time flat. Well played.

More newegg reviews. Still only the one bad review, though 13 still isn't enough to get a good read on them.

 

[murphyc]

TLER is IMHO almost irrelevant for consumer level NAS.

What's confusing about consumer NAS, and whether a Red drive should be purchased instead of Green, is how the RAID is implemented. Only RAID implementations that rebuild data from parity on the fly, without dropping the disk out of the array, benefit from TLER. So-called "software RAID" tends to not rebuild data in the case of minor sector errors, and they also are tolerant of non-TLER drives. They'll just wait for the drive's ECC to recover the data, whereas the more sophisticated RAID will accept a sector error from the drive and immediately rebuilt that RAID stripe from parity, all without dropping a drive from the array.

But it's totally non-obvious, I feel, what kind of RAID behaviors we actually have in consumer products. Some of the embedded consumer "hardware" RAIDs are actually using dm or md raid, so it is actually based on software RAID but appears to be hardware RAID - hence the distinction between software and hardware RAID is problematic.

Then the speed seem irrelevant too as on the NAS you will be limited by the network.

Yeah network saturation for GigE is happening with a single disk now. However, rebuilds can benefit from additional performance.

Head parking can be turned off in green drives.

Yeah I don't know if this is really a good idea or not. WDC support told me they've never seen a drive fail because of frequent head parking. Considering the tolerance between head and disk surface, any flaking surface coating is a head collision risk, and vibration and movement of the drive causes very small near contact with the surface that wears the head and platter surface - it may very well be a good idea for head parking to occur frequently - even if the sound and delays unparking it are slightly inconvenient.