I have a bunch of WD AV-GP drives that I plan to use for editing in Final Cut. Are these drives generally ok to use for this purpose or is the BLACK series really necessary?
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2TB WD Green Drives RAID 10 for Editing?
- Thread starter Dr Strangelove
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I think they try to spin down as often as they can, so you might get regular shorts burst of beachball while they spin back up, depending on your use. Also worth looking into Time-Limited Error Recovery on green drives.
Don't know how much of an issue any of this will be in the real world. You might just want to give the green drives a go and see for yourself.
I would not use Green drives for editing... I love them for archive, but wouldn't touch them as a scratch disk.
The Green Drives have a unique firmware on them which monitors usage and optimizes their RPM speed. Most raid arrays have no way to deal with this kind of thing. For this reason I'd go with the WD Black drives.
I can confirm 100% that these drives do indeed spin down when in a Raid.
Having set 4 in a Mediasonic box, it kept dropping the raid when the drives were spun down.
Do not use them.
I use mine for time machine backups in individual externals and bought seagates.
good luck,
Keebler
Having set 4 in a Mediasonic box, it kept dropping the raid when the drives were spun down.
Do not use them.
I use mine for time machine backups in individual externals and bought seagates.
good luck,
Keebler
I have two WD Caviar Green drives in a NewerTech mirror raid box, and I have been using them this week as the host drive for a video project I'm working on in iMovie.
I selected the green drives as larger replacements for the original drives because I don't access this box all that often normally and didn't see the point in having 7200 rpms spinning all the time unused.
That being said, I put the video on the green drives because of the mirror feature - it's an important project and I would hate to lose it halfway through editing.
I have noticed the beachball during my editing, and it also seemed like rendering the first DVD image file took longer than I expected.
I think in the future I will just use the green drives for my raid storage, and not as a working-file drive.
I selected the green drives as larger replacements for the original drives because I don't access this box all that often normally and didn't see the point in having 7200 rpms spinning all the time unused.
That being said, I put the video on the green drives because of the mirror feature - it's an important project and I would hate to lose it halfway through editing.
I have noticed the beachball during my editing, and it also seemed like rendering the first DVD image file took longer than I expected.
I think in the future I will just use the green drives for my raid storage, and not as a working-file drive.
The RPM speed of the Green drives is not adjusted during usage. The speed is fixed during the manufacturing process of the drive and can not be altered.
This possible difference in drive speed is actually perfectly fine for RAID controllers (read controller not array, the array doesn't care), especially software ones. Hardware RAID, however, does have a problem with these drives, as they do not support TLER. The same applies for the Black drives, though, although they can still be TLER enabled, a feature WD completely ditched for their Green line.
If the OP wants to use a hardware RAID controller, enterprise grade drives really are the only sound option. For software RAID, especially under OS X, any WD drive is perfectly fine. Black drives do give better performance, no doubt, but they are also considerably louder. I replaced all the Black drives inside my Pro with Greens after only a couple months as I couldn't stand the noise any more. With larger capacity drives (I replaced 1TB Blacks with 2TB Greens), the performance actually remained identical.
They do also spin down when not in a RAID.
However, this can be avoided by de-selecting the "put the hard disc(s) to sleep when possible" option in the energy saver preference pane. Naturally, this works only if OS X handles the array.
I've got two arrays of Green drives in my Pro (both RAID0) and neither does spin down. They do after about half an hour of me not using the computer, but while working, they keep spinning. I've actually never seen a beachball or experienced any kind of slow downs compared to the Black array. It's exactly the same.