Western Digital hard drive color codes

[Altster]

Been looking at getting another desktop (3.5") HD for my Linux Mint box and have come upon "purple labeled WD" hard drives. So now it makes me wonder. What's with all of the color codes WD?

So in doing some quick research, here is a quick lookup with explanations which might come in handy to others....

http://blog.usro.net/wd-hdd-colors-difference/

I never liked Green's and stayed away from Blue's too.

 

[HCHTech]

Interesting comment about the lack of error correction on Reds. Also, the new one - gold - "designed for servers", yet SATA only and 7200RPM. Hmm.

 

[TurricanII]

The article doesn't seem to touch on one issue of ATA in RAID, namely SATA drives dropping out of the array due to excessive time SATA drives can spend recovering from errors:

http://www.techworld.com/storage/what-is-time-limited-error-recovery-1019/

If you're choosing a WD drive for NAS/RAID I'd always check that it is designed with RAID in mind e.g.;

https://www.wdc.com/products/business-internal-storage/wd-re.html

 

[HCHTech]

designed with RAID in mind

Yeah - I guess that's why the Reds don't have error correction - they expect that to be handled by the RAID controller, and thereby eliminate the problem of the drive dropping out of the array because of the error correction task.

 

[Altster]

Well if I were going to put together any RAID array (small or large) I'd be looking at SAS and SAS RAID Controllers and bypass anything regarding SATA. In my opinion SATA is fine for desktop, laptops and other non-RAID devices.

 

[kwisher]

Well if I were going to put together any RAID array (small or large) I'd be looking at SAS and SAS RAID Controllers and bypass anything regarding SATA. In my opinion SATA is fine for desktop, laptops and other non-RAID devices.

I've been using SATA drives in software RAID for years with no issues.

 

[HCHTech]

Well if I were going to put together any RAID array (small or large) I'd be looking at SAS and SAS RAID Controllers and bypass anything regarding SATA. In my opinion SATA is fine for desktop, laptops and other non-RAID devices.

Certainly for NAS units, you are in SATA territory regardless of preference I would expect. I have seen my share of SATA RAIDs over the years; yes, they would be slower than SAS (and have a lower MTBF), but as long as they were done with enterprise drives and a proper RAID card, I wouldn't call the tech police, haha.

I was just in a customer's yesterday, they have an SBS2011 tower server, two SATA drives in a RAID 1 for the OS and 4 SATA drives in a RAID10 for the data. All drives are 10K Seagate 300GB Enterprise models, Adaptec RAID card. There is a cold spare drive unopened on the shelf, presumably purchased when the server was installed. Been running fine since 2012, probably won't replace until 2018 unless they have problems.