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Which WD drives for enclosure

M

MrMJS

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 11, 2014
69
2
Ohio
Hello,

I'm looking to pick up an OWC enclosure and am looking at Western Digital drives on Newegg. My question is which WD drives are best? (Green, Black, SE, RE, etc) This drive will store my data (os and apps will be on internal ssd)

Thanks for you help.
 
Green are good for power savings but are slower. Black are faster though the speed may be hamstrung because you'll be using it externally. Red drives are used for NAS units are designed for longer life and increased reliability needed for NAS
 
Since you're getting an OWC enclosure, I assume you're getting a Thunderbolt one? If you're just getting a USB 3.0 enclosure, why not grab one off Newegg?

That said, if it's a Thunderbolt enclosure, I'd suggest a 7200 RPM drive to get the best speed. Any WD Black drive, or possibly Red would do well. If it's a USB 3.0 enclosure, Green or Blue would be fine.
 
hallux said:
Since you're getting an OWC enclosure, I assume you're getting a Thunderbolt one? If you're just getting a USB 3.0 enclosure, why not grab one off Newegg?

That said, if it's a Thunderbolt enclosure, I'd suggest a 7200 RPM drive to get the best speed. Any WD Black drive, or possibly Red would do well. If it's a USB 3.0 enclosure, Green or Blue would be fine.
Click to expand...
There is no such thing (yet) as a single-disk Thunderbolt enclosure.
 
After doing some more research I think I'm going to get dual bay enclosure and run a raid 1 set up.

I got this from the WD website...

WD Black: Maximum performance for power computing. [Desktop] [5 year warranty]
WD Green: Cool, quiet operation with massive capacity. [Desktop] [2 year warranty]
WD Red: Designed and tested for RAID environments. [Desktop RAID] [3 year warranty]
WD Se: Optimal storage for NAS and scale-out architectures. - [Table-top to Rack-mount; Medium workload] [5 year warranty]
WD Re: [Durable capacity storage for high-availability deployments. - Rack-mount; High workload] [5 year warranty]
 
It would seem either the WD Red or WD Re drives would be the way to go.
 
Cubytus said:
There is no such thing (yet) as a single-disk Thunderbolt enclosure.
Click to expand...

The OP didn't specify which they were looking for (single disk or multi-disk). They could have been looking at both and trying to decide.

I suppose one can ASSUME a multi-drive enclosure is the goal if they know OWC's catalog without looking at the site (I don't, and didn't)
 
MrMJS said:
Hello,

I'm looking to pick up an OWC enclosure and am looking at Western Digital drives on Newegg. My question is which WD drives are best? (Green, Black, SE, RE, etc) This drive will store my data (os and apps will be on internal ssd)

Thanks for you help.
Click to expand...

How large a drive are you looking at? When you say store data, do you need fast access or simply storage that retrieval time is not important?

If you are treating an external drive as part of your day to day activities, a faster drive makes sense along with a TB enclosure or at least the full USB3 spec level enclosure (many enclosures for USB3 dont' give full spec capability so best to make sure if that is what you want, to get the full spec).

If you are simply storing data and not really a part of your normal activities, then it doesn't matter if you use a fast or slow drive or for that matter a fast connection.

If you need only a couple of terabytes, you might consider WD raptor drives striped. They used to come with a 5 year warranty but I am not sure if that is the case anymore. They consume less power than Black WD drives but are not the lowest power consumption drives out there. A nice set up might be 2-3 raptors for 2-3 terabytes (striped) along with a 3 terabyte slow drive to back up the stripes raptors. They could be housed in the same multi-bay enclosure. If you only need 1 terabyte, it still is not a bad option for one raptor drive.
 
For me.....

Green and Red ones are the better, based on my experience....Maybe you can get a deal on Reds....:D

:):apple:
 
phrehdd said:
How large a drive are you looking at? When you say store data, do you need fast access or simply storage that retrieval time is not important?

If you are treating an external drive as part of your day to day activities, a faster drive makes sense along with a TB enclosure or at least the full USB3 spec level enclosure (many enclosures for USB3 dont' give full spec capability so best to make sure if that is what you want, to get the full spec).

If you are simply storing data and not really a part of your normal activities, then it doesn't matter if you use a fast or slow drive or for that matter a fast connection.

If you need only a couple of terabytes, you might consider WD raptor drives striped. They used to come with a 5 year warranty but I am not sure if that is the case anymore. They consume less power than Black WD drives but are not the lowest power consumption drives out there. A nice set up might be 2-3 raptors for 2-3 terabytes (striped) along with a 3 terabyte slow drive to back up the stripes raptors. They could be housed in the same multi-bay enclosure. If you only need 1 terabyte, it still is not a bad option for one raptor drive.
Click to expand...

My goal is to run the os and apps on the internal ssd hd and use the externals to store all data. I don't know much about raids, I need to research. I do know I want to be able to back up the hd to another hd, that's why I thought raid 1 was the way to go for me. Thoughts??
 
MrMJS said:
My goal is to run the os and apps on the internal ssd hd and use the externals to store all data. I don't know much about raids, I need to research. I do know I want to be able to back up the hd to another hd, that's why I thought raid 1 was the way to go for me. Thoughts??
Click to expand...

Well, RAID 1 is fine if you want to protect against a single drive failure. You'll still need another backup solution to protect against complete loss of the device (fire, theft, power surge). RAID is not an end-all solution to prevent data loss when the array is the primary location of the data that's stored on it.
 
hallux said:
Well, RAID 1 is fine if you want to protect against a single drive failure. You'll still need another backup solution to protect against complete loss of the device (fire, theft, power surge). RAID is not an end-all solution to prevent data loss when the array is the primary location of the data that's stored on it.
Click to expand...

Thank you for you help! My thought was to buy smaller drives for clients and store those in a safety deposit box. I'd then back those up as needed.
 
MrMJS said:
Thank you for you help! My thought was to buy smaller drives for clients and store those in a safety deposit box. I'd then back those up as needed.
Click to expand...

You are getting into serious stuff here and it is excellent that you take precautions for your clients.

There are many types of "RAID" including some that offer zero protection for data. The most common is striping drives together so they act as one big drive. The problem is that if one drive fails, the entire data is lost. The striped drives offer however much faster reads and writes.

Mirroring drives can be done in three typical ways - you write to one drive and in turn it writes to another drive. Second, your main system controls writes to two drives at once (not common) and last is true bifurcation where the data goes first to some type of bus mastering chipset/firmware that writes to both drives independently of one another. The first option mentioned is far more typical and has some failure points. If the write to the first disk is bad, it will send bad data to the second disk.

Without getting overly complicated, you might simply use single disks and software that allows you to copy over to another single disk. As example, you may have two independent disks attached to your computer. You use one as your main storage and then on a regular basis, back up the data to the 2nd drive. There are a few software applications out there that do more than simply copy and are easy to use, some provide schedulers and of course there is Time Machine.

Last - I copy data regularly to both* NAS and directly attached external single drives. My NAS units are a higher risk than the single drives in some respects as if something goes wrong, the chance of recovery is not 100 percent. If one of my single drives fail, the other one has the data. I hope I am being clear as it is a lot to cover in a short space here.
 
Cubytus said:
Agreed, that's the first time I see such an enclosure.
Click to expand...

If anyone happens to be looking for a single-disk Thunderbolt enclosure I can recommend it highly. :)

It's well-constructed aluminum, very light and reasonably inexpensive (around $100 US). It comes with a carrying case for travel but is AC-powered, which I actually prefer since it only sits behind my iMac.
 
SaSaSushi said:
If anyone happens to be looking for a single-disk Thunderbolt enclosure I can recommend it highly. :)

It's well-constructed aluminum, very light and reasonably inexpensive (around $100 US). It comes with a carrying case for travel but is AC-powered, which I actually prefer since it only sits behind my iMac.
Click to expand...
Hm, I've seen prices upward of 130€ on German websites. Where have you found it?
 
Cubytus said:
Hm, I've seen prices upward of 130€ on German websites. Where have you found it?
Click to expand...

Here in Japan it is fairly widely available and I got it from a popular vendor of Mac accessories.

Last week, it was $98 at Amazon USA, but now it seems to have gone up to $108.
Code: 
http://www.amazon.com/Delock-External-SATA-Thunderbolt-Converter/dp/B00HESVYCE/

Please copy and paste the link above if you want to see the Amazon US site. The MacRumors site uses the extremely annoying GeoRiot which translates URLs into the local Amazon Store of the user.

It does seem to be more expensive in Germany! :eek:
 
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