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WD Blue vs Black: Reliability?

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Sakura90:
Hi :3

10 days ago I sent two WD drives for RMA, a 1.5TB Green and a 500GB Blue. Yesterday I received the replacements by mail... the Green is the same model (EARS) I had before, but instead of a Blue I got a Black (AALX) :P

I don't care about speed, already got a system drive, I'd only use the disks for storage. Are WD Blacks really of better quality? I mean in reliability. I've seen comparison between Blue and Black but they only talk about performance (which btw isn't a big difference it seems). Can the Black be considered "safer" than ordinary HDDs? Or it's all more or less the same?

I ask because I could sell it for a nice amount and get a nice case for my other HDDs ;D (here WD Blacks are scarce and quite expensive). But if Blacks are worth the while, I could keep it for a "safe" backup of more important stuff.


P.S.: Make the comparison with any other HDD, not only Blue. Has the Black any substantial quality/reliability improvement over other ordinary HDDs?

datora:
.
The Black edition (of both Caviar 3.5" and Scorpio 2.5" form factors) is THE premium Western Digital offering, manufactured with their best parts.  They come with a 5 year warranty, vs. the others with 3 years or less.

The Black drives are intended to be OS drives, where they experience constant read/write and are powered on almost continuously.  The performance gain is usually due to being SATA III (6.0 Gb/s), and 7200 rpm, where the other drives might only be 3.0 Gb/s &/or 5900 or 5400 rpm.  (caveat: some older Black Caviar drives are SATA II; I have a couple of those, but they aren't manufactured anymore.  Also, the Black Scorpio drives often still come in SATA II but, again, WD is halting production of those in favor of SATA III).

Black drives usually have larger cache, usually 32 or 64 MB these days, while the others may only have 16 MB.  So, yes, Black editions outperform Blue & Green editions under just about any imaginable condition.  The Scorpio notebook drives in Black might only be 16 MB, but that's changing.

You got a pretty spectacular upgrade.  There are higher grade WD drives, but they are industrial/server class and very expensive.  Be happy; WD customer service did a really cool thing for you.  :) 8)

megido-rev.M:
As far as my vague memories can recall, the Caviar Black has higher performance and quality (power, parts, cache, etc.), and maybe longer warranty than Blue. How that translates to a more reliable drive depends on usage, really. If I needed to, I likely would rid the low perf HDDs before anything, because magnetic HDDs are pretty much system bottlenecks in the first place.

Anyway, all I know is that when I did my system HDD research I had concluded the Black was far superior to the Blue.

Sakura90:
Yes, indeed. And more in my country where most don't gives a fuck about customer service <_<

When you say "manufactured with their best parts" I guess it means Blacks have a less % of failures...


Mhm... now I don't know what to do. I have a Seagate 7200.14 (ST500DM002, SATA 6 Gb/s, only 16MB cache) as system drive. I can't find any reviews of the 7200.14 line though, much less a comparison to the Blacks. Still, I don't use the PC for anything that requires speed, seeing 1080p is the most I do.

Should I replace it with the Black? I heard they are noisy (that IS a problem for me, for a system drive @ 24/7). Lol, maybe I should just keep the Black and compare the two myself (I don't want to open the sealed bag it came in, that way I can sell it as perfectly "new").



P.S.: Anything but magnetic is useless to me, as I have ~300GB for seeding. Plus the downloads, for me is all size and reliability, speed is non-important. Even noise has a higher priority for me :P

datora:
.

--- Quote from: Sakura90 on June 15, 2012, 12:48:26 AM ---Should I replace it with the Black? I heard they are noisy (that IS a problem for me, for a system drive @ 24/7). Lol, maybe I should just keep the Black and compare the two myself (I don't want to open the sealed bag it came in, that way I can sell it as perfectly "new").
--- End quote ---

Yes.

The Western Digital website offers Acronis software as part of their free & powerful software options for their customers.  You could clone your Seagate to your Western Digital.  I do this with 750 GB drives regularly, takes about 1-2 hours depending on how full they are.  You can also re-partition while you're at it, if you have need.

Anyway, if you clone the Seagate to the WD, just boot up from the WD and see what the noise & performance is like.  If you don't like, then put the Seagate back in.

Personally, I consider the WD Black drives to be about 10 or 100 times more reliable than Seagate.

Also, when you visit the WD website, get a copy of their Data LifeGuard software for analysis, formatting and sector alignment.  When I get my new drives, the first thing I do is run the Lifeguard software, do a quick check, then full check (full surface scan), then format using low-level format.  Takes about 2 hours, but it means that the entire disk surface is read & written to a couple times.  You'll find out fast if there is a problem.  At that point I consider the drive safe to format & use, either install an OS, use as data drive, or clone another drive to it.

If your computer has one Western Digital drive connected & detected, you can use both Acronis and Data LifeGuard on any other drive, regardless of manufacture.  A very nice bonus that can come in handy.  For example, I've cloned a Samsung drive to another Samsung drive using Acronis, just because a WD drive was detected somewhere on the system even though it had no involvement with the two Samsung drives.

When i perform the cloning of an OS drive, I reserve a small space at the very front of the drive, maybe ~8 or 10 GB.  I then run my cache on this partition (usually designated as the x: drive).  By placing it at the front of the drive, it is in the highest performance region and you get a small performance boost when your RAM needs to use the cache.  Also, because there is nothing else in this partition, the cache never fragments and is always operating at peak levels.

If/when you clone your Seagate drive to the WD drive, it will also largely defragment it near perfectly.  So, if you clone to the WD drive, try it, then decide its too noisy or something, clone it back to your Seagate drive to preserve any partition tweaks you've done and get it defragmented during the process.

Side note:  I have at least 8 WD drives, nearly all of them Black editions (two are older from before the color-coded era).  They are at least as quiet as any other drive I have ... virtually perfect silence unless I place my ear within a foot or two of the drive.  You should not have a noise problem.  Some people get a lot of excess drive read/write activity due to their configuration & what is happening on their drive.

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