Large HDDs Sale

Also, which WD external 8tb has a red drive inside? The last few that I took apart had greens which would generally make more sense for a single drive in an enclosure.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@eatstoomuchjam

Red and green are different only is few firmware settings.

eatstoomuchjam

Even if all the hardware is the same (which I'm not sure that it is), I'd also imagine that the reds are somewhat binned given their longer warranty and load/unload cycle count. Regardless, even a few firmware settings can make a difference - in particular, TLER support and much less aggressive head parking time (8s vs 300s).

I've been slowly migrating my stuff to Seagate Ironwolf because it's a bit faster, but if there's a way to get WD reds for that cheap, they might be compelling again.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@eatstoomuchjam

Head parking time can be adjusted.

As I said, for any normal use Greens are no different from Reds. Reds are the marketing thing that allowed to increase margins (they also have other Green copy line for security video recording).

eatstoomuchjam

Last time Backblaze was using a mix of green and red, the greens had a failure rate of 3.6% vs reds at 3.2%.

At present, the only remaining wd green drives cost more than wd red for a similar capacity on amazon (3tb green = $124, red = $109). Since I think green got rebranded to blue at some point, the blue version of the 3tb drive is only $85 atm so the red is a bit more per terabyte). Going to 6tb, however, the red and blue are the same price at $189.99 - though both are on sale, normally the green is $199 and the red is $211.

WD aren't exactly hyper-inflating their margins with those marginal price differences - and I'll take the reduced failure rate in my drives which run 24x7 (assuming that failure rates have remained similar since Backblaze was using anything other than red from WD)

Vitaliy_Kiselev

WD aren't exactly hyper-inflating their margins with those marginal price differences - and I'll take the reduced failure rate in my drives which run 24x7 (assuming that failure rates have remained similar since Backblaze was using anything other than red from WD)

Issue with Backblaze reports is extreme unscientific approach. Drives are from different batches, treated differently during transport, actual load differs quite much. Only thing it is good for is looking for some model with design problems.

eatstoomuchjam

Do you have a resource where someone did more scientific tests on the failures rates of large numbers of WD drives? If not, I'll go with "flawed, but best available" data.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Do you have a resource where someone did more scientific tests on the failures rates of WD drives? If not, I'll go with "flawed, but best available" data.

I just told that you need to understand thing you use. As for scientific tests, capitalism and science are badly compatible things.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Still working HDD deals

Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, $102 https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDR4000901/dp/B0196J3UZ2/
Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Portable External Hard Drive $119 https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDR5000100/dp/B01LZP2B23/
Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8TB $149 https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-External-Desktop-Storage-STEL8000100/dp/B01HD6ZLQ6/
Seagate Backup Plus Hub for Mac 8TB $149 https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-External-Desktop-STEM8000400/dp/B01JS7OJG6/

DrDave

The WD is back to $199 now, it was just a Cyber Monday deal for $149. I did however successfully shuck the Seagate 8tb, just the regular version, not the hub version. The drive inside was pretty zippy for a 5200 rpm.

eatstoomuchjam

@Vitaliy_Kisilev - Oh, I understand what I'm using. I explained above why I was interested in the reds vs green (blue) and you kept pursuing a weird narrative about increasing profit margins for minimal/no benefit - where the profit difference seems negligible and the minor, but existing reliability benefit(s) seem to have been demonstrated by non-lab real-world usage.