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HDD for a 24/7 PC; WD Blue or WD Red?

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Deal Addict
Oct 6, 2014
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HDD for a 24/7 PC; WD Blue or WD Red?

I am looking to get a new 2TB HDD for my 24/7 pc, and was wonder if WD blue or WD red would be more suitable?

I read some reviews on blue, that even tho it is a vanilla drive, it isnt design to be left on 24/7, while red is for NAS, so its better.

Is that true or just some marketing gimmick?
18 replies
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Apr 4, 2009
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No.

Blue is for regular PCs. RED is for NAS and RAID applications. The main difference is in the firmware, not the quality of the hardware.

Blue drives have auto spin down/power down/sleep power states/functionality.

RED have these auto power saving features disabled - because a NAS/RAID controller doesn't expect drives to auto power down/sleep.

So, for a normal PC that is not turned off ... the drives will auto spin down ... it will not run 24/7. Unless the PC is actually doing disk I/O 24/7.

Before WD's RED drives (and NAS specific drives), we had to go into the firmware and disable the sleep/spin down functions before installing PC drives in NAS enclosures. Now we can buy RED drives for our NAS boxes.

For superior hardware (corporate, data centre grade), purchase ENTERPRISE level drives - they much much more expensive. (i.e. 2x)
Deal Addict
Oct 6, 2014
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Busybuyer888 wrote: No.

Blue is for regular PCs. RED is for NAS and RAID applications. The main difference is in the firmware, not the quality of the hardware.

Blue drives have auto spin down/power down/sleep power states/functionality.

RED have these auto power saving features disabled - because a NAS/RAID controller doesn't expect drives to auto power down/sleep.

So, for a normal PC that is not turned off ... the drives will auto spin down ... it will not run 24/7. Unless the PC is actually doing disk I/O 24/7.

Before WD's RED drives (and NAS specific drives), we had to go into the firmware and disable the sleep/spin down functions before installing PC drives in NAS enclosures. Now we can buy RED drives for our NAS boxes.

For superior hardware (corporate, data centre grade), purchase ENTERPRISE level drives - they much much more expensive. (i.e. 2x)

Thanks for clarifying.

Well, I sometimes leave my PC 24/7 on for downloading, rendering etc. Is that consider 'doing disk I/O 24/7'?

So is WD Blue sufficient for my use? I see it at $99 promo now, and WD Red is $114, just $15 difference.
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Apr 4, 2009
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letmesee wrote: Thanks for clarifying.

Well, I sometimes leave my PC 24/7 on for downloading, rendering etc. Is that consider 'doing disk I/O 24/7'?

So is WD Blue sufficient for my use? I see it at $99 promo now, and WD Red is $114, just $15 difference.
WD Blue is correct drive to purchase for a PC. (i.e. don't buy a drive for NAS application.)

There is no issue with it running for long long periods of time, when downloading for days at a time.
Deal Expert
Aug 22, 2006
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Even Reds aren't "rated" for 24/7 operation.
The only drives that are rated are enterprise drives.
Deal Fanatic
Mar 6, 2005
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death_hawk wrote: Even Reds aren't "rated" for 24/7 operation.
The only drives that are rated are enterprise drives.
It's marketed as one though :D To be fair it's the same MTBF rating as WD SE Datacenter Drives. which are advertised as "24x7x365 reliability."
24/7 reliability
Since your NAS system is always on, a highly reliable drive is essential. With an MTBF of up to 1 million hours, the WD Red drive with NASware 3.0 is designed for the 24x7 environment.
Deal Addict
Feb 9, 2008
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Blue is the new Green, isn't it?

I used Green drives in my home server for years. Never really had any problems, but I did run a program that touched the disk every few seconds to stop it parking the heads.
Deal Expert
Aug 22, 2006
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tkyoshi wrote: It's marketed as one though :D To be fair it's the same MTBF rating as WD SE Datacenter Drives. which are advertised as "24x7x365 reliability."
I was mistaken anyway. Apparently it is "rated" (or advertised) for 24/7 usage.
Not that it matters anyway since ALL drives will die be it greens, enterprise, Seagates, HGSTs, etc.
Use it til it dies. Then replace it.
Deal Fanatic
Mar 6, 2005
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death_hawk wrote: I was mistaken anyway. Apparently it is "rated" (or advertised) for 24/7 usage.
Not that it matters anyway since ALL drives will die be it greens, enterprise, Seagates, HGSTs, etc.
Use it til it dies. Then replace it.
Agreed. It's not like they have validated that for real anyway, they just slap whatever on. Besides some of the enterprise drives run pretty warm which may cause issues in crappy NASs w/ poor ventilation.
movieman wrote: Blue is the new Green, isn't it?

I used Green drives in my home server for years. Never really had any problems, but I did run a program that touched the disk every few seconds to stop it parking the heads.
Blue is and still is the standard mainstream drive now, with red's and such and the movement to NAS I guess it didn't make much sense to continue to market the existing Green line. They have introduced 5400RPM drives into the blue line, however with the higher platter densities they should perform same/similar to the old lower density 7200RPM counterparts.
Jr. Member
Mar 18, 2013
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Toronto
Me too. My home server is 3 WD Greens that must be about 5 years old now. No problems at all. Maybe WD changed something now though, as these were purchased before RED existed.



movieman wrote: Blue is the new Green, isn't it?

I used Green drives in my home server for years. Never really had any problems, but I did run a program that touched the disk every few seconds to stop it parking the heads.
Temp. Banned
Aug 7, 2011
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And here I've been using Seagate Barracuda's for 5 years without issue.

Who knew!
Deal Expert
Aug 22, 2006
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squadz wrote: And here I've been using Seagate Barracuda's for 5 years without issue.

Who knew!
But but but Backblaze says it sucks!
Deal Expert
Mar 23, 2004
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movieman wrote: Blue is the new Green, isn't it?
Not exactly. Blue is now split into two types. Blues that are the same as what Greens used to be; and then Blues that are the same as what they always were. I.e. There's now 5400 RPM Blue energy-saving drives, and also 7200RPM Blue drives.

Previously there was Green and Blue...Green being the lower power drives (with lots of stupid parking and 5400RPM operation or whatever). Blue was initially supposed to be the mainstream 7200RPM drive (this was back before there was a Red BTW) and the Black the high-performance drive (better processor, more cache, etc.). But later the Blues seemed to largely disappear while the Green and Black seemed to be your main choices--either energy saving or high performance.

Greens started getting a bad rep, largely because of the parking and people actually using them in NASes etc. and having a lot of issues because they weren't really designed to work in that application (in this application failure rate was increased). Enter the Reds--they came in after for [home] NAS/server stuff. Basically Green drives without the parking and with firmware designed for that use.

I think Green had gotten a bad enough rep by now though that they just put the kibosh on the Green line and combined it with the Blue branding, while also "bringing back" the Blue because TBH it was largely gone from the marketplace--they still made them but no one ever bought them as it was either Green, Red, or Black. It still seems stupid to have two different Blues instead of a Green and a Blue but I guess they just wanted to get rid of the Greens which have a bad name to a lot of people.
movieman wrote: I used Green drives in my home server for years. Never really had any problems, but I did run a program that touched the disk every few seconds to stop it parking the heads.
Yeah see, most people wouldn't know to do that though and thus would end up victims of the excessive parking.
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Oct 6, 2014
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I just bought the new blue (5400), should I use software to touch the disk every few seconds then?
Deal Addict
Oct 17, 2004
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Red drives are only meant for RAID applications, the firmware is designed to fail more quickly when it encounters difficulty in reading sectors which allows the RAID controller to try another disk. This can be detrimental if you are not using them for RAID applications as given more time the drive may be able to read the sectors (which is good if you only have one copy...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
Deal Fanatic
Mar 6, 2005
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letmesee wrote: I just bought the new blue (5400), should I use software to touch the disk every few seconds then?
New WD drives now shouldn't need any modification. Also using the WDIDLE3 Tool may mess them up if you turn the timer off.
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letmesee wrote: I just bought the new blue (5400), should I use software to touch the disk every few seconds then?
If it HD is attached to a normal PC, there is no need to do this, just let the PC hardware and Windows manage everything.

Normal PCs and NAS/RAID systems expect very different behaviour from the disks. You have a normal PC ... a normal PC hard drive, out of the box is good.

If you want to do something, I'd turn off all the sleep features in the Windows OS instead. And plug the PC into a UPS to survive power outages and bad power issues. These two things would be FAR FAR FAR more practical than messing about with the HD's behaviour.

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