WD Red as a desktop HDD

[Ar]

I need a new larger hard drive, and saw the Western Digital Red version
has a good specification, and tighter tolerances, but says it's for RAID
systems. Is there something that stops it being used as a hard drive in
a normal system (non-RAID)? My system is powered on for most of the day
(way longer than office times), and often for few days running.

 

[miso]

I need a new larger hard drive, and saw the Western Digital Red version
has a good specification, and tighter tolerances, but says it's for RAID
systems. Is there something that stops it being used as a hard drive in
a normal system (non-RAID)? My system is powered on for most of the day
(way longer than office times), and often for few days running.

I don't see a problem with it.

Did you catch the WD rebranding PR going around last month?

http://www.desktopreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2199&News=Western+Digital+4TB+Server+Hard+Drive

So Red is their intermediate grade drive. That said, I'm a fan of mirror
RAID. If you ever need to clone the drive, the tools seem to be happy
just using one side of the mirror.

Of course mirror RAID is about as inefficient as it gets.

 

[Paul]

I need a new larger hard drive, and saw the Western Digital Red version
has a good specification, and tighter tolerances, but says it's for RAID
systems. Is there something that stops it being used as a hard drive in
a normal system (non-RAID)? My system is powered on for most of the day
(way longer than office times), and often for few days running.

What RAID needs, is a TLER driver, to avoid declaring a
hard drive is bad on a timeout. A regular drive, if a
sector is bad, may take 15 seconds to process the bad
sector. The RAID software won't wait that long, and declares
the hard drive dead after 10 seconds.

Using TLER setup software, the hard drive "truncates" its error
recovery attempt, such that the RAID software will not be
fooled into thinking the hard drive is dead. The drive responds
in less than 7 seconds, and the 10 second timer on the RAID
software is not tripped. That's the basic concept of TLER,
making the drive more appropriate for RAID usage. So the
regular desktop timeout constant won't result in unnecessary
"rebuild" operations for a RAID.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

You would want to read the advertising copy again, and see whether
the advertisement is saying "good enough quality, to be used
24/7/365 in a RAID array", or the advertisement says
"has TLER to prevent dropout in RAID applications".

If the drive is touting the first quality, then it could be
used in a desktop application. If it's just an ordinary
drive, with truncated error recovery, it *might* give up
on sectors a bit more readily than a regular drive. But
as far as I know, whether it spends 15 seconds or 7 seconds,
that is way too many attempts to begin with. If it cannot
read the sector after trying for a second or so, that sector
probably isn't going to ever recover.

So go back and give the advertising copy another try.
There is much bad advertising out there...

If I try here, I can see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital

"In July 2012, Western Digital announced a "RED" series of drives,
designed for NAS devices. This series of drives has a special
firmware designed for Home/Small Business environments, has
better reliability than standard desktop drives, is more
energy efficient and comes with a 3-year warranty."
<-------------->

Uh oh. Does that mean it spins down the spindle 400 times a day ?
I hate drives that do that.

Now, we go check some Newegg reviews.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...rue&Keywords=(keywords)&Page=1#scrollFullInfo

"Pros: These drives are rated for over 10x the spindle
start/stop cycles of a standard consumer drive."

That implies, for a NAS, they might intend to spin them down
when not in usage.

They mention TLER in the reviews, so the drive appears to
support the reduced time constant. The drive spins at 5900 RPM,
which is going to make seek time a tiny bit worse. And that
product only rated 3 of 5 stars, based on the number of DOA
drives. Red indeed.

There's a lot of checking to do, before buying a drive,
Just because something is on sale, doesn't mean it is
safe to buy. Keep reading.

Paul

 

[John McGaw]

On 6/13/2013 5:11 PM, Paul wrote:
snip...

What RAID needs, is a TLER driver, to avoid declaring a
hard drive is bad on a timeout. A regular drive, if a
sector is bad, may take 15 seconds to process the bad
sector. The RAID software won't wait that long, and declares
the hard drive dead after 10 seconds. snip...
That implies, for a NAS, they might intend to spin them down
when not in usage.

They mention TLER in the reviews, so the drive appears to
support the reduced time constant. The drive spins at 5900 RPM,
which is going to make seek time a tiny bit worse. And that
product only rated 3 of 5 stars, based on the number of DOA
drives. Red indeed.

There's a lot of checking to do, before buying a drive,
Just because something is on sale, doesn't mean it is
safe to buy. Keep reading.

Paul

WD offers a utility to change the spindown and park timing of their 'green'
drives because people have been concerned that they were wearing themselves
out trying to save power. It does work but I've not noticed any problems
with the drives in the first place and I have (roughly) ten of them in 2tB
and 3tB sizes. I do not know if the utility works with the 'red' drives
but, if one is concerned about timing issues, communication with WD support
should elicit some sort of answer.

 

[miso]

Then there is the theory that the drives last longer if you don't cycle
them.

The only drives I let spin down are the external usb drives, and I
probably should be disconnecting them since I just use them for backup.