WD HDD Choices

I need to up the storage size in my PC.

Is the extra money worth it to buy a 2TB WD Black? vs a 3TB WD Red? Greens are out of the question because I figure their read/write times wouldn't be able to handle LR shuffling the RAWs around. (Someone correct me if I am wrong please)

It would be a secondary drive (no OS or APPS) for storage of RAWs and family videos only.
Currently I have:

500 GB WD Blue for OS/APPS
1 TB WD Black for photos/video
250 GB Seagate for LR to write the preview files to

The idea would be for me to introduce the 2TB/3TB drive in and move my 1TB Black as a OS/App/Games disc and then phase the 250 gb out and use the 500 GB as the LR preview disk.

I don't trust Seagate so that is kind of out of the question.

Red is for NAS devices. Black is for performance. Blue is all general purpose. Green is economy, IMHO mostly for backups.

Suggest you get an SSD for OS, programs, cache and catalog, that will speed things up hugely. Samsung 840 or Samsung 850 is my pick, 128GB is sufficient - my Windows 7 install is 50GB with OS, programs (office, photography, development) and plenty of random things on it, but no swap, scratch, cache, games, or media. I have those on other drives.

I have had very bad luck with Seagate drives too. Specially the ones larger than 1.5TB. In my NAS box I have replaced all seagate drives with WD Red, and so far very impressed with those. If you are going to use it as single drive, than I would recommend the WD Black. If going with Raid then go with the Red.

Tim is right! Ive the same config.

Ok, I will grab a Black 2TB then and go from there.
I won't be RAID'ing them but I do plan on getting a NAS (i have been telling myself this for 3-4 years now... lol)

I would go SSD but I have a hard time shoveling the money for something like that. I see a SSD as a luxury and not a necessity for my purposes. I am just a hobbyist photog with a 3 year old and another due in April. My wife has been killin the current setup with a NEX 5n videos and RAWs along with me and my 5D RAWs. (Although i think it is more to her videos she takes of the kid)

How much space do you need for images, etc? You can currently buy a decent 120GB SSD for about $70 (not the best/fastest ... but decent), which is plenty big enough for you OS, programs, LR previews and backups. You just need to cull backups once in awhile to keep the drive from filling up.

You'd have 1.75GB of space on your three other drives for files, which is a decent amount of space, especially if you use LR and are making virtual copies instead of saving a ton of jpegs or TIFs. After switching to LR my HDD use went down to about a third of where I was running with my ACR to PS CSx workflow. I currently have 31,381 images in my LR catalog and have used only 1 TB of a drive that also contains all of my email, music and MS Office files.

Even a "slow" SSD will give a pretty reasonable performance boost to a 3 year old machine used for LR.

Red is for the NAS enclosure so it won't run to it's full potential if you install it on your desktop computers

I would never get Green drives as they, imo, fail. I've had two drives delivered to me and all were faulty on delivery

RichSoansPhotos wrote in post #17303381
Red is for the NAS enclosure so it won't run to it's full potential if you install it on your desktop computers

I would never get Green drives as they, imo, fail. I've had two drives delivered to me and all were faulty on delivery

Greens are fine for secondary or backup drives. I even ran a few in my NAS for a while, although I did disable the idle timer which is where most of the problems come from. They're not so good as a primary drive since the idle timer will cause it to wear out pretty quickly.

Just for storage, you get more space per dollar then SSD. I would love to have a 2TB SSD but my wallet wouldn't like it at all.

I've used greens, blacks and now REDs. Red is the new black as far as i know and they are in my opinion the most reliable.

Greens will be fast enough for what you need.

Bleufire wrote in post #17301909
Ok, I will grab a Black 2TB then and go from there.
I won't be RAID'ing them but I do plan on getting a NAS (i have been telling myself this for 3-4 years now... lol)

I would go SSD but I have a hard time shoveling the money for something like that. I see a SSD as a luxury and not a necessity for my purposes. I am just a hobbyist photog with a 3 year old and another due in April. My wife has been killin the current setup with a NEX 5n videos and RAWs along with me and my 5D RAWs. (Although i think it is more to her videos she takes of the kid)

SSD performance is definitely worth the extra money. To me it is no longer a luxury in my personal computer, but now a requirement. I even noticed a dramatic speed improvement coming from a WD Raptor.

I don't think I'll ever buy another WD or Seagate drive. I'll stick with Hitachi and Samsung (so long as WD and Seagate don't screw them up, too).

I have a WD Black 1TB and I love it!

I also have a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and I will never run a computer without one again! Crazy fast boot times, all my Adobe programs are installed on it. I have noticed significant load times with all Adobe programs (Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver are what I use daily). The transition from Lightroom to Photoshop is really fast, and even export times from Lightroom are amazingly fast now.