Western Digital Hard Disks - Which to buy? WD Blue, Black, Purple, Red, Gold and Ultrastar. 

The DC600 range is host managed SMR though, so this isn’t something you could accidentally buy. This requires that the host system can manage the drive. This is difference to DM-SMR (device managed) that we have seen on the Red and Blue drives.

Thank you, this was very generous. And not just the super, but the comment itself. Starting out as a creator isn’t easy, there is a lot to learn and it takes a lot of time invested if quality is important to you. So this kind of support is greatly appreciated. I hope you are right and I can get momentum with the channel, and provide content that people enjoy and find useful. 🙏

I came across his content only recently and Ive already learned some important things to look for in hard drives. This channel should catch on if enough people see it.

Thank you. 😃

Thank you, appreciated 👍

Thank you, appreciated. I like to try and make different content, rather than follow other channels. Really appreciate the positive feedback.😊

Appreciate it!

Thank you, appreciate you taking the time to comment and share your feedback.

👍

Appreciated, thank you 🙏

I have several wd blue ones for the first few years they worked for me 24/7,they currently have over 7 working years 10+ years in total and still working wd is a good brand at least for me

i have a wd blue hard drive and wd green ssd, and they've both lasted close to 10 years now

I've had USED HGST/Ultrastar drives that lasted over 10 years FOR ME at this point. Mostly 2GB models, a few 3GB. But to be fair, I also have quite a few 500GB models from WD and Toshiba pushing 15 years (but bought new) also - and have seen some of those die.

No problem, thank you for the comment. 👍

Love those disks. Good pick.

Thank you for watching it hot off the press. 😁

They have a great pedigree and a great reputation. And the data suggests that through the acquisitions, that remains which is great to see.

How do you find the drive? Do you use in a desktop? How loud is the drive?

@@kamilmielczarek5664 It's in a Fractal Define R5 tower case (glass side panel) with 6 other older generation Ultrastar drives. About half a meter from me. I won't say they're completely silent, but I can live stream on Twitch without a problem.

Yes, I have some content in the works on SSD architecture and performance. As well as SSD vs HDD. Been very busy recently, but lots coming. Appreciate the feedback and support.

I was reluctant at buying second hand drives but it can be quite interesting if the price is low enough. You have to have redundancy and backup tho. Some sellers even have cheap 3 years warranty.

For the larger capacities, they are typically going to be helium. This is true for most manufacturers for 14Tb and up, but there are some smaller drives. This is because helium fill reduces turbulence and the related heat generation and this problem gets bigger as the platters get closest together, which happens with more platters. But other than this, and that power use and heat production are greater on air filled drives, I wouldn’t worry too much about much about this. The warranty is the same, but the expected MTBF is improved on the later model, also Ultrastars appear to be good drives but the AFR does seem to be improving on later models. So the larger drives are probably better, and cheaper usually per TB. But if you only need a 10Tb drive, then the HC330 is going to be a good drive with a lower unit cost.

The black may be a little quieter, as the firmware is more tuned towards that and less for performance and 24x7 running. But from what I have seen on the drives, it’s likely the same platform/hardware with some firmware changes. NAS and enterprise will sleep less often, though you can set lower save settings, and maximising performance often means more aggressive seeks, which makes the drives a little louder. But personally, I would compare pricing and if the Ultrastars are the best price per Tb, I would go with that. The prices may vary, but often the Red and Blacks are more expensive than the Enterpise drives.

There should not be any problem with this at all. And if I was buying a large capacity disk for my PC, i would be looking at these disks if the price per TB was right, which it has been pretty consistently. Other than the noise, the firmware won't be as aggressive on parking the heads or power saving because for NAS / Data center use cases, power save isn't as useful as the disk would constantly be asked for access again. You can configure power saving to put the disk into power save, but I wouldn't do this too aggressively as its probably better for the drive to leave it to its thing. Unless you are really trying to optimize power. And on that note, there is likely a slight power increase for those drives, in the region of a watt or two.

The Re drives are now long gone I think, and replaced by the gold drives. But good drives as you say. :-)

The drives are largely based on the same platforms and components, but there are physical improvements on the higher models, such as better vibration sensors etc. However, most of the differences are in firmware, which is the code that programs how the drives work. Broadly speaking you can use any drive in a desktop PC, but enterprise drives will usually have better performance but will be a bit noisier and use more power, they will also go to sleep less often though power saving can be configured in the OS. But you can use any of these drives in a PC, and aside from a bit more noise, the higher end drives will have better warranty and will usually perform better, and as I talk about in the video, may not really be more expensive.

@@sometechguy I understand, thank you for your help. 🙂

The higher end drives typically have the higher performance and warranty. But they are also noisier, the noise is mostly related to head servo noise, and to get best performance, those are more aggressively tuned for higher performance so people comment on the noise from enterprise drives. NAS drives seem to be a little quieter, so maybe a Red Pro is a good balance but these NAS drives are often not the best value. So you may need to choose what is most important to you, noise or performance/warranty coverage.

@@sometechguy Thanks for the reply. I went with WD Red Plus 12TB as it seems to be quieter than Red Pro or HGST Ultrastar/WD Gold. Once I get it, I will be able to verify.

If they got to a year, then I would hope they would run on for well over 5. Nice drives.

I wouldn't think so, but will depend on exactly what drive models they are. But the Blue drive is likely to be an SMR drive, which will have poorer write performance on large writes, where the Purple has its cache usage optomised for writes, and won't be SMR. Overall, the purple drive is likely going to be the better drive, but will depend a little on what you use it for. Hope this reply doesn't come too late for you, and good luck with the PC.

Backblaze do have some data on SSDs, but it didn't look very extensive as the majority of their storage is on magnetic media. But I will take a look to see, and of course if there are other datasets it would be great to find them. I am planning to do some content on NAND storage also, as well as some comparisons on SSD vs HDD, so look out for that. And thanks for watching!

@@sometechguy I hope the failure percentage is just as low there, but I think it’s even higher.

Having an SSD as the system disk will make it a much more pleasant experience. It will boot a lot faster and load software and other files much faster. So I would recommend an SSD, ideally an NVMe disk for the boot and system disk. But it probably depends exactly what you do with the machine and what capabilities the motherboard has. But you can use a relatively small and cost effective SSD for that, and use a HDD for storing large data.

Hybrid SSD + HDD system is most balanced scenario. NVME is great addition but its performance gains depends on amount data your system reads in one go, still its not bad idea to get one if you have place where to put it. I was hesitating far too long to use SSD as system drives and difference is very visible.

You should be able to find WD Ultrastars ok, and those are an evolution of HGST unit, and are also basically the same as WD gold under the hood. I did a comparison of the larger capacity enterprise disks based on BackBlaze reliability data and they seem really solid.

I couldn't find a HC510 for sale easily, but if I compare the 12Tb HC520 and the 16Tb HC550, the price per Tb for the 16Tb drive is maybe 20% better. The data I have seen suggests the newer (larger) drives are also a little more reliable. So personally, I would pick the 16Tb. The premium in the UK right now, is around £30 including tax, so around $38 US. So if you can afford that premium, its better value per byte. Of course, not sure on price and availability where you are. And thank you for watching, even though English is not your first language and I hope you could get some value from the video.

@@sometechguy I was thinking of buying toshiba mg 10tb. Then, thanks to your video, I thought about buying Ultrastar 10TB, but when I learned that the HC510 series was also produced by HGST, Then I decided to save a little more money for the Ultrastar HC550 16TB, which is the original WD. Thank you sir.

WD owned HGST for a long time now, and now all the HGST Ultrastar drives are branded WD. The HGST drives had a great reputation for build quality and reliability, and that still appears to continue now that they are branded WD. Good luck with the drive purchase!

@@sometechguy Oh I thought only ultrastar hc510 ones were hgst. Now I have to think again. Thank you for your time and information andd good luck on your RU-vid journey!

SSD and HDD bring different value. A time will come when these spinning drives are gone, but until the cost, reliability and long term endurance catch up, they will have their purpose. And yes, the Ultrastars appear to be great drives, at least from the data that is available from disks that have been running for an extended period. The price gap is also closing with Seagate.

Thank you, hope it was helpful. 👍

The motherboard and PSU shouldn't be a problem. Power draw for the black and Ultrastar will be similar and sata HDD do not draw a lot of power, 5-10w. I personally would buy the Ultrastar, especially if you get more for your money. Comparing the two, the Ultrastar would give you a little extra throughput performance, but there isn't much in it and you don't buy HDD for high performance compared to NVMe or even SATA SSD. The Ultrastar will likely be a bit noisier, as most enterprise drives are and the default for power save may spin the black down sooner as its a desktop unit, but you can adjust power save settings. But in many ways, they are similar from a hardware perspective, most of those changes are in firmware. The Ultrastars are great disks, and though the blacks are good as well, they are often overpriced.

@@sometechguy ok thanks a lot. That 14tb new hdd Ultrastar costs me 150 usd and the WD Black 6tb costs the same, so, there is the answer. The Ultrastar gives me more for my money. Now, as I told you, I will use it for backup; movies, documents, finished renders and all that stuff. In my Pc I have a 2 tb predator mx7000 nvme, 1 tb Adata su800 ssd and I will add the Hdd. Now, I didnt undestand you very much about the noise and energy. Do you use pone configuration for that? Thanks a lot dos your answer, i think this kind of info helps a los people un choose a good component without overprice and just marketing.

Thanks for watching, and I think the answer does depend on what you need. What size NAS do you have, and approx how much storage space do you think you will need? It will also depend on the prices where you are, but the Ultrastars are a great choice currently, but Toshiba and Seagate may also be a fit depending on prices. Happy to give some ideas with a little more background. 😁

@@sometechguy I am an IT administrator and currently planning a new NAS and SAN environment. While searching for new hard drives, I came across your videos. I found the data and information from Backblaze very interesting. Price is not a concern :-) the most important thing is very good reliability of the hard drives. They should have a low failure rates. In the end we would need arround 300-400 TB in total 😄 So every hard drive should have more than 10TB

I have another video that compares reliability data from each of the manufacturers (you may have seen it) and the WD Ultrastars have been very solid over the last 10 years or so. I can't say for sure they won't release newer drives with issues, but its a great place to start. There is some hard data on some capacities that fit your profile, but you would reasonably extend that to drives of higher capacity in the same product line, especially given the long term reliability trends on the Ultrastars. The larger capacity models probably offer the best storage density as well as price per Tb. Large drives take less bays and provide more flexibility for scale up. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-icNbexYV3M4.html But I don't really believe in telling people what to buy, as there are many variables such as price, availability and possibly support in different places. But I do try to provide the info to help make an informed choice. Hopefully this all helps, and thanks for checking out my channel.

@@sometechguy Thanks for the information. We will check out the Ultrastars ☺️

This is my assessment also, because for some time the enterprise disks have been cheaper per TB. If that changed and they cost less, I could change my mind but I would stick to the Pro versions which are very similar disks. The Ironwolf Pro's do come with data rescue services, but I wouldn't want to rely on that anyway.

I agree, and research heavily before buying. Hope this video helped some with your research and welcome to the channel. 👍

Greens have been gone many years. They are all included in the blue line now.

Thanks for this pointer, that’s interesting. This is again disappointing for WD, they never seem to learn how this negatively impacts customers opinion of them, and not sure they are even doing this, just call it what it is with the lower rate. Or use a 5400rpm platform.

It probably depends on your capacity needs. Small cheap and quiet is probably Blue from WD range. Most drives are pretty quiet of not being used though, with lower RPM drives helping also.

@@sometechguy I dont think this information is accurate. I decided to get a WD Red pro as I wanted the increased performance and reliability and I figured it would be quite when not in use as you have mentioned. Unfortunately it seems newer wd drives keep making some noice even when idle for Preemptive wear leveling PWL reasons. Every around 5s I get some noice even tho there is 0 activity on that drive

HDDs on the shelf will last way longer than SSDs as the data doesn’t degrade naturally like SSDs. However bitrot is a thing so data can get damaged over time and starting up the disk now and then and performing some kind of data integrity check is a good idea. It will vary, but to give you an idea, 10years is the kind of number you could think about, but occasionally doing a full data integrity check and fixing errors before they broke unrecoverable would extend that. YMMV

@@sometechguy I meant drives that have never been used. Ever. Others have asked and answered about drives containing data and left in storage, I already know the answer.

They were discontinued about 9 years ago.

Thank you! For me the SMR instance had three dimensions. Firstly, they did not disclose the change transparently. They were not alone there, and all the major manufacturers put SMR drives into their lineup without good disclosure. For example, the sustained write performance numbers are typically maximums and do not measure the impact once the write buffer fills and SMR has to start managing the rewrite of zones into its throughput. Secondly, WD were the only one to put this into a NAS drive, and the issue wasn't specifically for ZFS, but really for any RAID implementation, which is really what NAS drives are for. Maybe less so during normal operation, but terrible for rebuilds as the long term write performance was significantly worse, causing disks to be ejected from RAID arrays or for rebuilds to take far longer, or to fail. And thirdly, when pressed on the issue they declined to admit it for some time. People contacted WD support and asked, and were not given an answer. This is how it really became the issue it did in my opinion. Mistakes get made, and its how you show up in response that really speaks about company culture. WD did not show up well. So I think they do deserve the backlash, and as a customer, I can only hope lessons were learned. Though subsequent similar failures suggest they didn't learn a lot. But that's just my two cents. 😎 As for UK prices, it varies but US prices have often been better across many market sectors, especially technology. Any UK retailer has to price with sales tax (VAT) included, which I prefer to the US system where I really can't tell what I will pay without doing some math. And UK sales tax is 20%, so this doesn't help, where it can vary by state in the US. However, prices can vary and be better here based on current exchange rates etc. What was interesting to me from looking at the prices is that the Blue drives actually represent a lower price point per Tb than the higher end drives in the US, which didn't hold true in the UK. Given that the drives have lower performance and warranty cover, if you can live with some of the enterprise drive characteristics, such as power and noise, a pro/enterprise grade disk is better value here. Of course things change, so it may not be the case in 3 months, but if you are buying, its worth checking that situation at the time. Thanks for dropping by, making a reasoned comment and sharing your view. I appreciate it.

I agree, WD do not help themselves. They have some good products, but they also have some not so good products. This can happen, but when it does it's the way you handle it that counts. And they have a history of making bad choices in the way they deal with this with their customers. And its a shame.

Prices do vary over time and by location. Depending on where you are it can be due to competitive pressure, availability and the exchange rates between currencies. I compare prices here in the UK often between the high capacity enterprise drives (18-24Tb) from Tosh, Seagate and WD to catch bargains and prices do seem to vary fairly often. But comparing how prices compare against these in the video could indicate when to buy and when to wait.

Though SSDs do fail, they have shorter life’s when used intensively, so for normal laptop or external usage, they are going to generally last pretty well. But maybe you are alluding to some recent issues with WD / SanDisk, if so then I hope so also. Not sure off hand of those models were affected, but actually SSDs have many failure modes and internally they are pretty complex. Some people point to HDD failures as being answered by using SSDs, but it isn’t that straight forward. Good luck with those disks, and of course keep backups of i pet any stuff. 😊

@@sometechguy No, I wasn't alluding to anything. I just know there's been lots said for and against them. However, they do provide a significant performance boost.

@@James_Knott yes, SSDs are the go to drive for boot drives and primary storage for performance reasons. But they can wear out faster than spinning disks for a few reasons, and WD recently had some issues with some of their SSDs failing much earlier than expected.

This is really interesting. Is it possible the larger cache and TRIM support is there in support of their AllFrame technology? Writing streaming data may be more efficient if the data can be buffered in cache in larger chunks, and then written sequentially rather than writing many streams in different locations at the same time. And maybe TRIM is there to help with cleaning up when data is overwritten. This is worth of a deeper dig. And with disks getting larger, large parallel file writes are not going to just be limited to streaming applications, there is quite some effort to wring performance out of spinning disks. I couldn't totally exclude some misdirection on the recording technology, but I would think it would be very risky to misstate this clearly in documentation. They suffered a class action as a result of the SMR drama before, and this would be far more egregious. There is also the subject of storing more drive metadata off the platter and on cache or nvram to help with performance there also.

@@sometechguy Well, SMR use TRIM for its zones optimization (internally its moving data around much like SSD do, rewriting from CMR disk cache to slow SMR zone). TRIM on CMR would imply its SSHD, but isnt they all extinct? Even if not, TRIM issued by OS, so to use NAND part of drive as cache there is heavy need of proper support of that by OS, i didnt seen any mention of that by WD. Speaking of Allframe, yes, large cache can help with writing videostreams, but i had feeling its more about ATA steaming and optimization to parallel writes. I have WD40PURZ and its have 64Mb and no TRIM support, while also advertised as Allframe. Heck, when i was purchasing i got exactly this model because it was 100% CMR while models with larger cache was actually cheaper. I have slight fear WD is still wanting to switch everyone to SMR one day.

@@sometechguyThere is some reddit posts about this, searched for "WD43PURZ TRIM" - people found Purple drive featuring TRIM. WD support given very vague answers about this topic directing on some white paper about how TRIM can benefit HDDs (bit funny enough its paper about SMR drives). So, its very inconclusive. Its possible its just firmware stub doing nothing in respond to TRIM. Or not?

Thank you, you came with some really interesting info here. I will check in on that thread and dig deeper on this. There do appear to be a new generation of Purple with superficially very similar stats, but with different model numbers. So something is going on.

There should be no problem with the way the disks are oriented, though I would not change the orientation while they are spinning. And just for clarity, what did you mean by 'red toshibas'? this video was about WDs, though I have others that cover Toshiba and you may have been referring to one of them. And the 'Red' disks are made my Western Digital.

I have not heard of any issues with Helium leakage, many reports of drives beyond their warranty and still reporting 100% on the helium content. Also, air drives are actually not sealed and it seems particles getting past filters and causing head impacts is a real thing that helium doesn’t suffer from. Maybe this is worth some analysis, but it seems that helium drives provide better reliability than air filled variants. Of course, YMMV and there are always outliers. So maybe a dive into the data on this is worthwhile. 😁

@@sometechguy Maybe i was unlucky, idk. I think it's an very interesting topic tho. What you say about air filled drives is also true. Personally i only experienced that with the horrible well known Seagate 3TB drives: st3000dm001. Sometimes they gave bad sectors and after cleaning the drive with an airblower the bad sectors where gone.. I had 12 of these all made in Thailand, China versions where even worse. All died within 4/5 years of running time. I made the switch to WD and HGST and never looked at Seagate again. It seems they improved according to your video's. I really like your in depth content, keep up the good work 🙂

The analysis of the backblaze data, which does only contain MG07 and MG08 Toshiba Enterprise drives, but it's around 56,500 drives as a sample size, shows they have good reliability. And when I have made videos about Seagate and WD, there are usually quite a few comments from Toshiba fans questioning why they don't get more focus. But for sure, the variety of models and the total drive count provides a smaller sample size to analyze than for WD/HGST and Seagate. So it looks like there is quite a fan base, even if their market share of the HDD market is only around 18% or so. And unlike Seagate and WD, there are far fewer comments slating them for being bad. But again, smaller market share so probably expected. 🤷‍♂️

Yes, for sure. NVMe for boot disk and for games libraries, maybe an SATA SSD and spinning disks are great for mass storage like media.

I agree, I am salty about the SMR history. The technology isn't 'bad', but it has upsides and downsides and I think this wasn't well communicated so expectations were not set properly. But that said, I believed there is continued work on improving SMR, and there are device managed and host managed versions of this, so maybe things will develop in this space. I just hope the 'customer feedback' that happened over the last few years changes some attitudes about the transparency of this technology to users.

The purple is a perfectly good choice for this. The current purple range doesn't contain any SMR drives, but the capacity only goes up to 8Tb, so for 10Tb you are looking at a pro disk, which is also a great disk. Your use case is not a demanding one, so most of the disks would be fine, though I would generally avoid SMR. So check which of drives gives you the best price per TB, and you would be fine for what you need.

One of the opinions of all time, go watch the other vids on his channel about average drive failure rate to actually inform yourself instead of taking one drive manufacturer as the messiah. companies are not and will never be your friend, make your decisions based on the facts and data collected.

Poor bstrd

WD still does the green range on SSD, but for hard disks….it’s gone.

@@sometechguyoh i didnt know that