[UPDATE] The price increased to $180, but still a good price.
CMR
5640 RPM.
$174 / 8TB = $21.6 per TB
Full specs here: product-brief-western-digital-wd-blue-pc-hdd.pdf
CamelCamelCamel.
Won't be a problem at all.
Yes. This is "that blue drive" thats CMR again.
This is suitable for basically anything bulk storage related.
Only $20 more from UMART if you dont like your HDD's amazon-shipping-tested….
Wait so with this being CMR, this would be fine for a NAS? Or are they still saying that Reds are the only way to go for NAS drives?
This drive isn't "designed" for a NAS, but it is possible to use them in one and even enable RAID. But NAS drives (sometimes) have a longer warranty and are more tolerant of vibration
Some discussion about Blue vs red
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5nm4pn/situati…
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/would-wd-6tb-blue-5400r…
@scrimshaw: Vibration is correct.
The forum threads are very old, and differ greatly based on drive technology.
Sadly, this isn't an area where you can generalise, you have to go model by model (as much as it does my head in….)
Yes this would be fine for a NAS. The only thing it's missing is vibration sensors for dynamic speed adjustments; but realistically, 5k RPM drives don't cause too much issue there, so it's not a big concern.
CMR drives are usually more durable than SMR drives when you get to the crux of it, but realistically there are so many other modes of failure for a HDD that this probably shouldn't be the deciding factor for most users.
But to answer your question - this drive will be fine in a NAS, don't worry too much about all the marketing. Ultimately having multiple backups of things that you cannot afford to lose is key.
@aaronsd: Do you have a link to the durability reports? Thats not something I've seen or experienced.
I'll check the BackBlaze documentation now, because you have me curious….
The usual issue is the shingled write speed once the cache is saturated.
@MasterScythe: great question to be honest. I have a small ZFS set up with a few 4TB drives in it and I had a little scare last year when one of them died and the whole thing took so much damn time to recover itself, then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand the whole SMR vs CMR stuff and to be honest I still don't understand how the magic works but the basics I gathered as like so:
Other ZFS users also have reported issues with having SMR drives in their array and having very long recovery times on the storage - it really makes you shit bricks when it's meant to be parity storage too!! (This one is easily verifiable by looking through Reddit/ZFS)
The way SMR drives work, they read and rewrite data a lot because the write head overlaps multiple tracks that the read head goes over (https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-wha…), from what I gather, when rebuilding an array with parity type storage, this read/write process adds a lot of overhead within the drive. People on Reddit have reported other SMR drives in their array failing during the rebuilding process - this seems to have some link to the way it reads/writes
I found it really hard to decipher the enterprise storage provider datasets out there when I looked into this in more detail last, the enterprise drives they use seem to have all kinds of additional features and there also seems to just be specific models that tend to fail more than other models - and I don't believe that's related to CMR vs SMR. Another issue is that the really high storage capacity stuff tends to be SMR because CMR just doesn't allow for as dense storage. How did you go with the latest report?
I haven't bothered looking into this in much detail but found a website with a funny name: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/hdds-arent-as-durabl… (TL:DR - Secure Data Recovery provided us with a little more information on the defective HDDs tested. It said that 37 percent of the Western Digital and Seagate drives analyzed featured SMR. The firm found that, "Western Digital's SMR models had a 12.7 percent shorter lifespan than their CMR counterparts, [and] Seagate's SMR models had a 19.7 percent shorter lifespan than their CMR counterparts," when looking at average power-on hours. Further, eight of the 13 SMR drives from Western Digital and Seagate registered fewer than 15,000 power-on hours on average.)
Besides the report from Secure Data Recovery in the last point, the rest of the above is all really anecdotal to be honest - either my own beliefs or that of other ZFS dabblers on Reddit. I try to stay away from SMR (specifically for ZFS usecase) now just because of that one-off experience I had
"That blue drive" that has the same specs as the red drive on paper?
No, certainly not.
It's lacking vibrations sensors, the extended warranty, and the 3rd party data recovery offers. It also uses a less paranoid CRC in its firmware.
On paper it's quite different.
In reality, its only 1 feature thats 'important' and at 5k speeds, how important is up for debate.
I have this from a previous deal and it is really good
Is $21/tb good in this day and age? Looking to replace an aging 4x2TB NAS at some point (hopefully before the drives fail)
this drive usually goes for $190-$200 and it is a CMR drive.
You can buy locally without having it shipped from USA though,
$195 = https://www.umart.com.au/product/western-digital-8tb-blue-3-…
Any deal on docking station for drive?
Will this be any good in an NVR? TIA.
Not recommended as NVR does a lot of writing… best to get the purple drive, but that's me…
Have they sorted out the problem of the high failure rate for the blue drives?? WD BLUE have had a bad reputation for years
Do you actually have any evidence for WD Blue reliability issues or are you just trolling?
Not trolling. You can read forums and reviews from magazines, online reviewers and such…. you'll find WD Blue have had a bad reputation and unusually high failure rates over the years. %-wise, is quite alarming for anyone. I'm not bias for seagate or WD. Do some research and find out.
So what does your research say? Have they sorted it out or not yet?
@ggbhai: Bit mixed. A lot of sites recommend the seagate barracuda still over WD blue but don't state that it's a failure rate problem. In older reviews, they DO state that's why they picked the barracuda over the blue, due to unusually high failure rates.
Gonna be a very noob question, but can i literally connect this to my mac and use it?
I assume when you said Mac, I assume it is either a Macbook Mini, Macbook or iMac. If it is, you cannot connect this directly. You will need either an enclosure or some kind of SATA to USB-C converter. You are better off buying a proper external drive or external SSD than buying this.
Would this be good enough for Movie storage?