Using a WD Red drive for photos and videos

sep9001

Suspended / Banned
Messages
5,610
Name
Kev
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi

My 1tb WD black is getting full and I need to get another drive. Based on my old PC being a sata2 will I notice any difference in speed of Lightroom if I swap the drive to a WD Red? LR is installed on a ssd.

Thank you

Kev
 
I'm sure there will not be a noticeable difference.
 
Red is a model optimised for NAS usage. So unless the premium in the price over a green or blue is very small I wouldn't get it for desktop usage as you won't get the features.

Black is best for performance unless you add another ssd.
 
Using SATA 2 you will not notice any performance difference between the wd red and black so get the cheapest.
 
A wd green or blue then ;)
 
I tend to recommend HGST Deskstar's as they fair well on price and reliability. I've always been an advocate of buying more cheaper drives to ensure data really exists in three different places, rather than buying more expensive disks and then struggling to fund a proper backup solution.

Aside: Not sure why you would opt for the WD Red in any circumstance. When you read through the marketing hyperbole, I don't think they really make much difference in a consumer grade NAS system. The WD Green drives used to be problematic with their overly keen head parking leading to lots of power cycle counts. On the early Green drives you could tweak the firmware to make them suitable for use in a NAS environment, but WD disabled those features when the WD Red drives became available. The other major difference is TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) - but I don't think that's even an issue when using software raid, which most consumer grade NASes use. In other words, I think NAS specific drives are just a way to encourage folk to part with more $$$.
 
2x Samsung Pro SSD's for system/photoshops scratch disc and the rest is only WD blacks for PC, WD reds for NAS (Still have one 3TB WD green tho for temporary data)

Personally would not trust anything else than WD for data storage
 
As far as I know the main difference on red HDDs are that there are more sectors available for swapping out when they become corrupt (which happens on all HDDs).

So they may last longer before going bottoms up.
.
 
Reds are great.

I have the following disks in my Mac Pro
1 x SSD mac OS and programs
1x SSD windows (for gaming)
1x 2 TB Red for all files
1x 2 TB Green back up of Red

Red in my NAS and Red in my USB backup of NAS.

All work really well.

Greens take a while to power up though. (a fraction of time, but noticeable).
 
IME, once a mechanical disk starts losing sectors, it's not long before things start going terribly wrong.

When I was researching my home server build, I found a paper somewhere comparing failure rates in enterprise disks versus consumer grade disks and the upshot was the consumer grade disks did not fair too badly in terms of MTBF. I can't find that paper now, but I've found another showing the MTBF on enterprise disks to be far higher than manufacturers claim. The same paper also suggests utilisation has little bearing on drive life expectancy. Searching on "consumer versus enterprise hdd failure rates" provides some interesting results.

I know it's anecdotal, but I've still got some stuff still on a pair of WD Greens that must be at least four years old now. I used to use them in a second NAS for backup purposes only. They accrued a very high load cycle count and the array regularly degraded. Now running under ZFS file system they're still going strong. ZFS has not had to repair any of the file system due to data corruption in what must be nearly twelve months. I'm very mindful about swapping them out, probably to another pair of Deskstars.
 
Thank you all for the comments and suggestions. Will looking into this further. The only reason for going with the WD Red is they are cheaper then Black and quiet.
 
Hi

My 1tb WD black is getting full and I need to get another drive. Based on my old PC being a sata2 will I notice any difference in speed of Lightroom if I swap the drive to a WD Red? LR is installed on a ssd.

Thank you

Kev

You could get an external HDD and transfer any files you hardly open much to the external, freeing up more space on your internal HDD for more work.

I usually do a lot of work on the computer's HDD, when they're done, after saving the file for the last time, I move them to a folder I label Archives on an external HDD.

That way, you keep your current 1TB HDD and add another HDD rather than swap HDDs.
 
You could get an external HDD and transfer any files you hardly open much to the external, freeing up more space on your internal HDD for more work.

I usually do a lot of work on the computer's HDD, when they're done, after saving the file for the last time, I move them to a folder I label Archives on an external HDD.

That way, you keep your current 1TB HDD and add another HDD rather than swap HDDs.

Thanks, I have already made a backup, just need to ensure that I delete the correct files.
 
Sorry, but is anyone else having problems starting a new thread?
 
Not tried since this thread.
 
Back
Top