[mythtv-users] Red drives

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Ian Evans <dheianevans at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just curious if anyone's using the WD Red drives in their backends? I read
> somewhere that they were very reliable.

Anecdotal reports will be unreliable.  The advantage of the RED drives
is that WD does not disable the ability in their firmware to set error
recovery time limits, nor disable the ability in their firmware to set
sleep timeouts to disabled.  This of great importance for (especially)
hardware RAID configurations(*).  In addition the warrantee is slightly longer
(less than what all drives used to be, but longer than their consumer
drives).  Much research with statistically significant numbers of drives
suggest that drives tend to fail reasonably early, or last "forever".  There
are, of course, bad designs (can anyone say "DeathStar"?  I knew you
could :-), but usually those bad designs (and higher failure rates) are
not seen until the drive is out in the field for a few years.  Since new
designs are introduced every year or so, even the most reliable vendors
drive generation may have problems in the next generation (i.e. next
years model).  As WD RED is a branding, and not a particular model
and generation of drive, the answer to "is it reliable" is going to be
anecdotal.

Gary

(*) As with much else, your mileage will vary, but RAID configurations
are usually not recommended for MythTV.