Danoc wrote:Yo Richie that's a nice find! I heard the "RED" concept, what's that? Do the Red run better?
Oh also I looked at the specs but is this drive Sata, is it 7200 RPMS, also is it 3.5? If its all three I will cop 4 of these! I don't use those types of enclosers anymore, I will sell all four enclosures at once at a nice price like you said, I have 3 of these enclosures, they are the best I have found with low noise ratio.
Danoc, there is a type of hierarchy when it comes to how hard drive brands and series are graded. So for storage, Western Digital RED series drives are the ones to have for NAS related stuff. They have a different firmware configuration for how the drives seek, when they go idle, and have a 256 MB cache on them, which still enables them to have fast and sometimes faster read/re-writes than older 7200RPM drives even tho these ones are set at 5900.
The cheaper WD drives are the WD Green, the regular ones are the WD Blue, they have enterprise ones such as the WD RED GOLD and then the WD RED which is above consumer grade with extended warranty and very low failure rates, run cool and are quiet. You may or may not notice that with some hard drives, you will hear them ramping up or a clicking sound here and there. The drives that click a lot are due to them parking their read head (think of it like a tone arm on a turn table) on the platter which is awful because they can get stuck, causing physical damage to the platter itself and causing a bad sector. the WD red NAS drives are configured differently to not do that sort of sh*t.
Cheaper drives that have higher failure rates are those 4TB Seagate drives, which is why they're always cheaper and are fine if you need a junk drive for downloading movies and don't care if the sh*t dies on you. There are some newer higher end Seagate drives that offer 5 year warranty and free data recovery if the drive dies, but you're looking like $500 per drive for that. So it could be worth it depending on the importance of data you're handling.
What is important to note for you or anyone else reading this is -- You can find enclosures like the ones that Danoc have pictured, but those are for the most part running in JBOD mode and do not have any sort of data retention or protection enabled. It's just an external enclosure to have a grip of disks connected. When you want to get more serious about it, you'll have to explore raid setups to determine what is the best for your needs such as a RAID mirror and parity drive, so if one hard drive dies on you, you can pull it out, replace it with a new one and it will rebuild the mirror where you didn't lose shit. I'll keep it simple for now as I 'm not even sure most people will read what I'm writing anyway.
My apologies for the long post people. If anyone is all that interested, we can make a separate topic to discuss drives and backups as it's a topic that is glossed over on this forum.
Peace