WD hard drives...not what they used to be?

[rollatorwieltje]

There are no harddisks for 'rural' environments...
Think about living in a world where there are no SUV's.

Sorry.nobody makes those.

Drives are specced for an office environment.

Not quite right. Hard drives for notebooks are built to be thrown around. They can take a lot of G forces and some even have systems which park the heads if the drive detects it's about to receive a big hit.

I have yet to find one that will last more than 2 years. Although I've never lost any data, not a single harddrive in any of my laptops or portable harddrives lasted for more than 2 years. They just start to fail by becoming insanely slow or freezing the machine randomly, start making nasty clicking noises etc. Doesn't matter what brand, I've probably had them all.
I don't abuse my laptops at all, I still use my 10 year old Dell D8600 every day (it was a bit of a pain to find a new harddisk for that, it  has a PATA drive). For my newer 2011 MBP I just ordered a new harddisk as the current one is starting to fail by making nasty clicking noises.
I don't really mind it, drives are cheap and every new drive was noticeably faster and bigger than the one it replaced.

So far the only drives that have lasted a long time are WD RE3 500GB drives in my desktop (in raid 0), I think those were bought in 2009. They probably don't really have that much operating hours on them though.

[justanothercanuck]

What drives should I buy? WD RED series is easily available. Are they suitable?

WD red are best suited for RAID applications.

The old scheme was blue = desktop, green = low power, black = performance/raid...  They changed that a year or two ago and split up the old black into what it is now.

[amyk]

I have yet to find one that will last more than 2 years. Although I've never lost any data, not a single harddrive in any of my laptops or portable harddrives lasted for more than 2 years. They just start to fail by becoming insanely slow or freezing the machine randomly, start making nasty clicking noises etc. Doesn't matter what brand, I've probably had them all.
I don't abuse my laptops at all, I still use my 10 year old Dell D8600 every day (it was a bit of a pain to find a new harddisk for that, it  has a PATA drive). For my newer 2011 MBP I just ordered a new harddisk as the current one is starting to fail by making nasty clicking noises.
I don't really mind it, drives are cheap and every new drive was noticeably faster and bigger than the one it replaced.

I have a feeling you're doing something very very wrong if all your drives die so soon; probably subjecting them to excessive vibration. Check the SMART info, it's not helpful in all cases but in this one the problem is likely to show up there. For a laptop, using an SSD really makes sense since they are shock-resistant. All the other parts of a laptop are nowhere near as sensitive to shock as the hard drive.

[Fsck]

personally, my longest running live drive is just short of 34000 hours.

if I dig out some older drives to check their smart data, I'd probably get some with longer run times.

WD Red is their "NAS solution". probably a move to save from the WD Green TLER debacle.

[free_electron]

if the drive detects it's about to receive a big hit.

Wow, tomorrow's technology today.

That is what the g sensor detects. It detects the drive is falling , so in the impending near future a big hit is to be expected.

[Forced Perfect]

I still use my 10 year old Dell D8600 every day (it was a bit of a pain to find a new harddisk for that, it  has a PATA drive). For my newer 2011 MBP I just ordered a new harddisk as the current one is starting to fail by making nasty clicking noises.

Western Digital still makes new PATA drives. You can grab Blue series PATA drives.

[Fsck]

if the drive detects it's about to receive a big hit.

Wow, tomorrow's technology today.

That is what the g sensor detects. It detects the drive is falling , so in the impending near future a big hit is to be expected.

problem is, HD manufacturers have restricted vibe sensors to their business/enterprise/expensive drives. it's a pretty huge cost difference.
currently, just short of double for a 4TB drive. 300$ vs 160$, or thereabout.

[Towger]

From memory, the original WD Reds were the same as blacks with different firmware. The  difference is the number of times/length of time they will retry reading a bad sector before returning 'General Failure Reading Drive x' is far shorter than a standard drive.
The idea is that on a server with  RAID5+ drives, system uptime is more important than being able to read data from a dieing disk. What happens with a RAID5 of standard disks is the system 'hangs' while a drive retries, until it eventually fails and the controller drops the drive from the array. The Red drives will 'fail' much faster, allowing the RAID controller to drop the drive and the server to continue running without interruption.

[Forced Perfect]

From memory, the original WD Reds were the same as blacks with different firmware. The  difference is the number of times/length of time they will retry reading a bad sector before returning 'General Failure Reading Drive x' is far shorter than a standard drive.
The idea is that on a server with  RAID5+ drives, system uptime is more important than being able to read data from a dieing disk. What happens with a RAID5 of standard disks is the system 'hangs' while a drive retries, until it eventually fails and the controller drops the drive from the array. The Red drives will 'fail' much faster, allowing the RAID controller to drop the drive and the server to continue running without interruption.

Reds are closer to Greens, than Blacks, I believe. They are both low power (5400-ish RPM), low noise. The difference between a Red and a Green is the firmware and some mechanical stuff*. The firmware on the Red is tested for RAIDs and they "approve you using it", meaning they won't tell you to screw off if you call in a warranty claim for using the drive in RAID-5. They have a larger MTBF and won't die when run 24/7 (they don't warranty the Greens for constant use - how messed up is that?)


*The Red series drives' spindle is mounted at both the top and the bottom like an enterprise drive (and like much older drives all had ). Making it more stable and reliable. I suspect this is the main reason they have the higher MTBF.