Hard drive reliability (specifically WD)

[AllGold]

I have several 3.5" Western Digital Green Power 5400RPM hard drives that have been totally reliable over the years (knock on wood) and are very low power. It looks like they have been discontinued for a while and the "newer model" according to Amazon is the 5400RPM Blue.

My Google-fu appears to be FUBARed and I haven't found anything useful on WD Blue reliability. Can anyone share their experience or a link to a review or two?

BTW, I like the lower RPM, more efficient drives for storage. High performance comes from SSDs which will whip any 7200RPM drive.

[jdc]

All drives fail, not if, but when.

For every 5 people that say XX drive is the best, you will get 5 more that say XX is the worst.

Just buy whats in your budget from a brand you like.

[btfc]

https://metanophilia.wordpress.com/2015/...ital-hdds/

[Racer X]

The Blues were originally their cheap and essentially OEM bulk drive quality drives. Sorry to hear the Green drives were discontinued.

[TheTominator]

Another set of data points in a report from a company, Backlaze, that uses a lot of drives (over 70,000) and keeps track of failure rates is found here
.

For the Western Digital drives it looks like they report on only three models/capacities of the Reds. Greens and Blues aren't in their data set. Despite that, this report may be useful to see the failure rate stats for different manufacturers for comparable drives. It is clear from their results that the HGST drives had significantly lower failure rates for Backblaze.

[TheTominator]

AllGold wrote:
BTW, I like the lower RPM, more efficient drives for storage. High performance comes from SSDs which will whip any 7200RPM drive.

I also prefer lower RPM spinning drives in the high-capacity situations.
Less heat.
Less vibration.
Less noise.
There are all good things.

My NAS has two 5400 RPM WD Reds in a striped configuration that is plenty fast for my needs.

I wish 5400 RPM and 4200RPM drives were more readily available for me to use in my external enclosures for backups. The loud and vibration-happy 7200 RPM drive I have now annoys me each time I turn it on.

[DP]

I've had three or four WD externals and never had a failure. I fill them up fairly quickly tho...

[Onamuji]

TheTominator wrote:
For the Western Digital drives it looks like they report on only three models/capacities of the Reds. Greens and Blues aren't in their data set.

Blue drives are for suckers.

[Mr645]

The WD Red drives are designed to be more reliable then the typical lower cost consumer grade drives. Black series is also rated higher MTBF

[GuyGene]

This reminded me of the Jasmine drives...