[mythtv-users] Red drives

[Gerald Brandt]

I stick with WD Blue.  They've been reliable for me.

Gerald

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Evans" <dheianevans at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion about MythTV" <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 3:20:34 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Red drives



So what's the current word on the Greens? I have a 1.5TB model, but I remember a thread a while back that people were cautious about using them with Myth. If you were looking for a 2TB/4TB drives these days for recordings, what would you go with? 




On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Gary Buhrmaster < gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com > wrote: 



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. 


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-- 
Ian Evans 
Executive Producer 
Digital Hit Entertainment 
http://www.digitalhit.com 
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