Hard Drives

Need some opinions on hard drives now that the holiday discounts are coming up. Looking to up my storage space in my WHS and thinking that WD Blacks are the way to go? Currently I have a couple of WD 500g Greens and some other older lower end drives. I have 6 slots and two of those are the 500 gig drives. Looking at 4 drives in the 1.5 - 2 TB range. I used to be a fan of seagate until they had that 1.5 TB drive quality problems and now I am paranoid to try them again. (2 failed).

So for a system running 24/7 with weekly back ups, what would you suggest for drives? I have 4 TBs of space now, working my way up to 10.

Thoughts?

Use the green drives for storage, no need for the speed of the blacks for non-OS drives. The 2TB wdears drive is around $90-$100 right now at Newegg. Keep an eye on slickdeals.net for some good promos. The wdears drives will need to be "adjusted" if used in WHS though as they use 4k clusters which are only supported in new OSes. A quick search will explain in more detail.

When I was considering drives to hold media performance wasn't an issue. I decided against the Seagate and Western Digital drives because of three things: how they parked the heads, mean time to failure, and warranty. I ended up getting the WD Black drive, as the Seagate 2TB drive was a lot more expensive over here at the time.

I ran a poll on brand reliability recently, and all I learned is all drives fail. Seagate and WD are my picks though.

if we are using LR and PS on the photos stored on the drives, will a WD black have a significant benefit over the green when it comes to performance?

Probably. The cache drive is most important, but for working with RAW images buy the biggest, fastest drives you can find.

Ok the drive partition sync might throw a wrench in things. I wasn't aware of that. Though the write ups seemed pretty straight forward on how to get around that.

I use a WD Green 1.5tb drive for my RAW working files, maybe I will get a Black drive and transfer the photos to that, and use the green for the server. Guessing I would pick up some speed that way.

In2Photos wrote in post #11271584
Use the green drives for storage, no need for the speed of the blacks for non-OS drives. The 2TB wdears drive is around $90-$100 right now at Newegg. Keep an eye on slickdeals.net for some good promos. The wdears drives will need to be "adjusted" if used in WHS though as they use 4k clusters which are only supported in new OSes. A quick search will explain in more detail.

woot slickdeals.net ftw!

cory1848 wrote in post #11274796
Ok the drive partition sync might throw a wrench in things. I wasn't aware of that. Though the write ups seemed pretty straight forward on how to get around that.

I use a WD Green 1.5tb drive for my RAW working files, maybe I will get a Black drive and transfer the photos to that, and use the green for the server. Guessing I would pick up some speed that way.

That sounds like a good plan.

You could also pay about $20 more and just get the eads drive instead of the ears drive. That won't have the same problems with WHS.