WD drives and Snaps

[Phoenix32]

If you have been a reader here long, you will know that WD drives over the past several years (other than the expensive RE drives) are not a good choice for Snap Servers. Why? Because of their timing in firmware, they like to drop out of RAID arrays, a lot! Or not even alllow you to build the array in the first place in some cases. (Mostly RAID 5, but not all)

Well, UNLESS THESE ARE JUST REBADGED RE DRIVES, WD may have seen the light.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6083/w...mized-hdd-line

Even if they are just rebadged RE drives (which I don't think they are), as long as they are priced like other mainstream drives, this could open up WD for Snap use.

[SaFeHeX]

Thanks for the info.

I've never liked or trusted WD drives for anything, even in non RAID configurations. I've seen far too many faulty ones over the years to ever trust them.

It certainly seems that they have seen the light over the firmware issues, so maybe these new one's will be better than their old doorstops.

[blue68f100]

At least there more reasonably priced.

[Phoenix32]

At least we have another option now.

The next thing is prices. Drives need to get back down where they were. I firmly believe the HD manufacturers are milking the crap out of those floods and that they could have the drive prices back where they were already, months ago.

[SaFeHeX]

Originally Posted by Phoenix32

At least we have another option now.

The next thing is prices. Drives need to get back down where they were. I firmly believe the HD manufacturers are milking the crap out of those floods and that they could have the drive prices back where they were already, months ago.

Agreed and agreed!

Just before the floods, i was about to buy a few 2TB drives, but i was dithering over prices, special offers, specs and different models etc.

I could pick up basic 2TB desktop drives in the UK for about £55 -> £60 at the time and then it happened. Availability dissapeared and prices went through the roof. Prices are coming back down now but still no where near what they were at.

I also think that with the SSD explosion around the time of the floods, many people are favouring small SSD's in PC's and this has effected mechanical drive sales in general. I'm assuming the manufacturers are making up some of that loss by way of the pricing on large drives.

Because of the rise in smaller, fast, SSD's though, i beleive a lot of people will be turning to NAS solutions, and of course demand for large drives will continue to grow. Hopefully bringing those prices back down with it.

Prices for any technology are usually always driven by demand.

Until then..... I demand that prices come down!!

[Terry Kennedy]

Originally Posted by Phoenix32

Well, UNLESS THESE ARE JUST REBADGED RE DRIVES, WD may have seen the light.

They're closer to the RE-GP type than the RE. So they're a slower spindle speed (WD doesn't state the speed, calling them "Intellipower", but they're in the 5000-5900 RPM range).

I'm not sure WD "saw the light". They could have simply stopped playing games with the GP firmware and provided a utility that would allow the user to configure both auto-spindown and TLER (bonus points awarded for using industry-standard commands so 3rd-party utilities for Linux, *BSD, etc. would also work).

While WD is expanding their variants, Seagate has discontinued their Green drives, saying that the power savings compared to non-Green drives are trivial and are dwarfed by the lost productivity from waiting longer for data due to the slower speed of Green drives.

I'd like to see a smaller number of models (perhaps 5xxx RPM, 7200 RPM, and 10K/15K RPM) and a "pick your warranty" choice of 1/3/5 years, with industry-standard configuration utilities to select power-save / performance / RAID profiles. This would vastly reduce the number of SKU's and let WD concentrate on innovating via things like higher platter density (which has the useful side-effect of reducing power-per-TB).

[kearmith]

I'm not sur if my anwser ar appropriate,

But I got many problem with a 2 tb WD drive into a SNAP 520 on raid 5

We solved it by adding a jumper under the drive the slow down the transfer rate to 6 gb to 3 gb and it work weel for last year!

The price of larger drive was start to going on begin of the summer