WD Red Pro vs non-pro?

[Knowltey]

So, I'm looking at these two WD Red 3TB disks, one is labelled as pro and the other isn't

Pro

Non-Pro

The only difference I'm seeing here is that the rotational speed on the non-pro is listed as "IntelliPower"

Is the IntelliPower the WD technology that I've read about here before that has some issues on FreeNAS with spinning up and down way too often that if I remember correctly was an issue when using WD Green drives? Are there other issues or performance losses that may be encountered with IntelliPower on FreeNAS?

For the record I am still deciding between two options. Purchasing two and adding them as a second mirrored vdev to a zpool with currently one mirrored vdev. The existing disks in the pool are 7200RPM disks (one is an older WD Black and the other is an older Samsung Spinpoint.)

The other option I would be looking at would be getting 6 and putting them into RAIDZ2 configuration.

Other specs: Supermicro MBD-X10SLM-F-O, Intel Pentium G3220, 16GB Samsung DDR3 ECC.

 

[Ericloewe]

The Pros are 7200 RPM drives, the non-Pros are 5400 RPM.

IntelliPower is marketing for "We make it sound like our drives can vary their angular velocity even though they don't. They park their heads after a while, though."

The Reds haven't been problematic (outside a batch around December 2013 that came configured like the Greens, with an 8s idle timer - most Reds are set to 300s). The "problem" with the Greens is that their default settings are way too aggressive when it comes to parking their heads (8 seconds), which means they relatively quickly burn through their 600 000 Load/Unload cycles, if not reconfigured.

 

[Knowltey]

Thanks for the info, it sounds like my other option of using WD Blacks 1TB 7200RPM drives for a RAIDZ2 seems to be the more sane and cost effective option in this situation.

 

[Ericloewe]

The Red Pros seems to be cheaper than Blacks around here, and I'd expect them to be the same thing (kinda like non-Pro Reds and Greens).

I'm not sure if the Blacks have TLER, which might be interesting, depending on what you're using the storage for.

 

[Knowltey]

Well for the 2,3,&4 TB the Red Pro and Blacks are going within a few dollars of each other. For 1TB though it's either Black or the Intellipower Reds.

One of my current disks already is an older Black and I haven't had any issues with it.

I'm pretty light on storage use though, right now I'm only at 650GB of my 1TB pool and my expansion rate is quite minimal, the higher space would just mainly be for extra fault tolerance and larger space for my computer backups.

 

[Fraoch]

The 7200 RPM drives consume more power and run hotter, so if you install several of them you may have to increase cooling or even upgrade your power supply.

 

[Z300M]

The 7200 RPM drives consume more power and run hotter, so if you install several of them you may have to increase cooling or even upgrade your power supply.

I have 12 x 7200rpm Seagate drives in iStarUSA cages. The temperatures at present -- idling -- range from 27C to 31C.

 

[pschatz100]

For typical NAS tasks you won't see any performance difference between 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm drives. You can combine them as well in RAIDZ. Lately, I've been using the regular Red's but I also have some Greens that have been fine (use wdidle to set timeout to 300s.) I have very little trouble with disks in general, but I do make it a point to burn them in before putting into service and I make certain they stay cool.

 

[johnblanker]

a little late to the party here. I just noticed the "Pro" labeling. I guess I am late to notice that too. My Freenas machine is for streaming video to my Dune players. Aside from maybe a ~15MB/s transfer speed increase, what kind of duties would a freenas system need to be doing to benefit from switching to a 7200 drive?
Thanks.

 

[AVB]

The WD Red are 5700 rpm drives in the 5 & 6 TB size and the Red Pros are 7200 rpm. I don't know about the 8TB one . You get a longer warranty with the pros though.

 

[Ericloewe]

The WD Red Pros are 5700 rpm drives in the 5 & 6 TB size.

You mean 7200 RPM, right? The original sizes definitely were 7.2k RPM.

 

[AVB]

You mean 7200 RPM, right? The original sizes definitely were 7.2k RPM.

Correct, sorry. I've edited the post to correct it.