Hard Drives WD Gold vs WD Red Pro

[bad_vlad123]

Hi all I just built a Nas box (see below for sepecs), it is 32 bays - My question is should I go with WD Red Pro 6TB sata or should I spring the extra cash for the WD Gold 6TB Sata? Will my system have any issue recognizing these drives? Thanks..


1x 4u 36 bay 847E16-R1400LP Chassis SAS2-846EL1, X8DTN+ Mother Board

· - Integrated Dual Intel 1000BASE-T Ports

· - Integrated Software Supported RAID

· - Integrated IPMI 2.0 Management

· 2x Intel Xeon E5645 Hex Core 2.4GHz

· 128GB DDR3 (16 x 8GB DDR3 ECC REG)

· 36 3.5" Caddies

· 1x LSI 9211-8i RAID Card

· Dual 10GBE 10 Gigbait Card PCI-E SFP+ HBA Supermicro AOC-STGN-I2S

· dual 1400 PS

 

[Spearfoot]

Most of the users here on the forum will advise you to use plain WD Red drives instead of Gold or Red Pro. The Reds are cheaper and spin at a lower RPM so they run cooler as well.

 

[bad_vlad123]

Most of the users here on the forum will advise you to use plain WD Red drives instead of Gold or Red Pro. The Reds are cheaper and spin at a lower RPM so they run cooler as well.

No kidding - even with 32 bays? Wouldn't vibration be an issue?

 

[Spearfoot]

Good question! But quite a few users use large numbers of Red drives in their systems.

There's been a lot of discussion about it. For example:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/wd-red-drives-5-drive-limtation.16106/#post-81856
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/need-critique-of-a-32-drive-preliminary-build.20030/

A search of the forum will turn up many more examples.

I have WD Re, Red, and Green drives, plus HGST DeskStar NAS and UltraStar 7K4000s. In the past I favored enterprise gear, but lately I've come around to the view that cheaper drives like the basic 'Reds' are just fine.

It's up to you, of course. If budget isn't a consideration, enterprise drives like the WD Re or HGST UltraStar devices are quite attractive. And they have a 5 year warranty, which is one reason I like them.

 

[Mirfster]

I have WD Re, Red, and Green drives, plus HGST DeskStar NAS and UltraStar 7K4000s.

Variety is the spice of life eh? :)

 

[Spearfoot]

Variety is the spice of life eh? :)

My wife doesn't like me thinking so!

 

[Mlovelace]

You gotta go gold, yeah baby!

 

[Spearfoot]

View attachment 12129
You gotta go gold, yeah baby!

The WD Golds do look impressive!

 

[Chris Moore]

Sorry to dig up such an old thread, but I was doing a search to try to get more information on this very question.
I just want to get some advice from the community here.
I have several servers I support that were delivered with all bays populated with the same kind of drive.
Some systems are all HGST, others are all WD Red, others are WD Red Pro and others are Seagate Constellations. I see varying rates of failure among them and I need to purchase some replacement drives.
My question is, and maybe it should be a new thread, can I just buy WD Gold Enterprise drives as spares across all systems instead of stocking all those different brands?
It is company money so I am not as worried about the cost as I am the reliability. What are the benefits or other concerns?

 

[nightshade00013]

I wouldn't see any major issues. The performance would not really increase much if you have a slower drive in the pool with a faster drive so there it would be a waste of money if that were an object.

The Gold drives should run a little cooler than a comparable drive like a Red Pro since the Gold's are helium filled. They should also use slightly less power as well. This is with the idea that both drives are the same RPM (7200)

However you could also equally stock only the Red's. They would slow down the pools a little since they are running at a slower rpm. I don't know if they would run cooler than the Gold's or not, I suspect it would just about be a toss up between the two. Same for the power.

I would overall decide if performance and warranty is more worth it than cheaper drives.

 

[MindBender]

I'm sorry to revive this old thread, but I'm currently replacing my drives and I'm considering both WD Red Pro and WD Gold.

@chris: Which drives did you end up buying? You have suggested WD Gold in my other thread and I would like to know more about your experiences and consideration.

A quick search revealed that WD Gold has advanced features, such as variable flight height. But WD Red Pro has Native Command Queuing and twice the cache (256MiB). Here in the EU WD Red Pro is more expensive than the WD gold, perhaps because of the cache, but the difference in price is too small to be a consideration.

 

[Chris Moore]

My direct experience.
At work, we bought 12 of the WD Gold 6TB drives to have as spares for the servers that need this size. So far, we have only deployed four of the Gold drives as replacements for the Red Pro drives that were delivered by the system vendor with the hardware. The Gold drives have given zero problems. All of them passed the burn-in testing with no errors and the four that are in pool are working so similarly to the Red Pro drives that the difference is within the margin of error.
This model: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235058
For work, I would buy them again. For our situation, we saved a little bit of cash because they were a little less expensive vs the Red Pro.

We bought a new server in the same time period and picked the Seagate Exos drives to populate it. If you are willing to give them a try, we have had 60 of the Exos 10TB drives running for about three months and in the burn-in, we only had one reallocated sector and no other errors at all. We have already dumped a little more than 250TB of data into the system and it's really great.

 

[Chris Moore]

We have a server that was delivered with 60 of the WD Red Pro drives, like this:

We have lost four of those drives to drive faults and replaced them with the WD Gold drives, like this:

For us, at the time of purchase, the WD Gold drives were less expensive. Looking at New Egg just now, that is not the situation. At this moment, the Gold drives are running about $55 more, for the 6TB size, but it might still be worth it if the failure rate is lower. So far, we have had zero errors from the Gold models tested and zero errors from the ones in service.

 

[MindBender]

I think both WD Gold and WD Red Pro drives are top-of-the-line drives and excellent choices for my FreeNAS, but after flip-flopping back and forth a number of times, I decided to go for the (8TiB) WD Gold drives, and here is why:

1. Everything in the datasheets indicates that these drives are build to last (MTBF 2M5 vs. 1M) and at high work loads (550TB/y specified, 219TB/y verified vs. 300TB/y specified)
2. FreeNAS setups have more in common with a Server than with a NAS. I got the impression that NASware, available on Red (Pro) drives, is more targeted at proprietary firmware in ReadyNASes, Synologys and other of-the-shelf NASes
3. Features are very similar: Both have 256MiB cache, StableTrac and Dynamic fly height technology
4. Performance is very similar 225MiB/s (Gold) vs. 235MiB/s (Red Pro)
5. Gold drives are more silent in idle: 20dB vs. 29dB.
6. Red Pro drives feature Multi-axis shock sensors, a desirable feature, but Gold drives feature RAFF against vibrations, which is more desirable to me
5. Gold drives have Helium Drive Technology, a dual-stage actuator and TLER Firmware

Unfortunately, WD does not offer a detailed comparison chart of their drives. The information above is what I could gather after a couple of hours or searching. Some sources were recent, others a bit dated, so the list may or may not be completely accurate anymore. Please note that price wasn't a consideration. At this moment WD Red Pro is a bit more expensive, a few months ago WD Gold was a bit more expensive. When spending €1600 on hard drives, a couple of €100 more or less is not going to make much of a difference anymore.