On 02/05/2018 2:20 PM, Paul wrote:
Yes wrote:
An ad at newegg got me curious.Â* AS much as possible in layman's words,
what is the difference between Western Digital's black performance
series of desktop hard drives and their gold enterprise series of hard
drives.Â* newegg had a shell shocker deal today for a WD Black 2TB
Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache
3.5 Inch - WD2003FZEX.Â* I continued browsing newegg and ran across a WD
Gold 2TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s
128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD2005FBYZ offered for the same price.

I know the "black" series is a consumer model aimed at gamers, and the
"gold" series is aimed at the business sector.Â* Both models have the
same capacity (2TB) speed (7200 RPM), SATA (6Gb/s) and form (3.5").
The only difference I can determine between them from the ad is that
the "gold" model HD uses a larger cache (128MB) than the "black
performance" model (64MB).

In the past, I would have expected business (enterprise) level drives
to be more expensive than consumer grade drives because the enterprise
drives needed to be more durable and reliable than the consumer grade
drives.Â* In this instance, they're priced the same.Â* So I'm trying to
figure out which type (black or gold series) makes sense to buy.Â* I
prefer reliability and durability, but I fall into the target audience
for the "black performance" drive.

Shouldn't the "gold" drive work as well as if not better than the
"black performance" drive?.Â* Thoughts about what other issues to
consider?

In terms of what I do on my pc, 95% is email and browsing.Â* The rest is
just playing CRPG games from around the year 2000 - Baldur's Gate,
Morrowind, etc.

The terminology is mostly rubbish.

Before you buy something, read the reviews on Newegg or Amazon and
see if you can spot rubbish before you buy it.

The last two higher-end WDC drives I got, they "park the heads".
I don't buy high end drives so I can sit here waiting for
them to spin up again. I didn't particularly plan on my desktop
behaving like a laptop. My older WDC drives (Black and RE) don't do this.
(Probably around a half dozen of them.)

Basically, all the shortcomings of these drives were listed
in reviews. Even the "funny noise" the 2TB WDC RE drive makes,
the reviewers were spot on the money. Mine makes exactly
the same noise, at shutdown. The basic rule of thumb is, the
more mechanical noise a drive makes, the sooner it will
wear out.

Drives intended to operate in an array (8 drives in the same
housing), they have an additional feature, where a piezo
actuator right at the head level, makes small corrections
to the tracking, at really high speed. This is much more
responsive than servo tracking implemented at the voice
coil. As a consequence, the various drive families are
rated for "how many drives can sit next to one another
and hum, without throwing off the other drives". A higher
end drive should be array compatible and have that
additional tracking feature. You don't need this
feature, if you only have one HDD and one SSD in your desktop.

All the drives use FDB motors. WDC arranged some to be
fixed at the bottom, others to be fixed both top and bottom.
(Motors are not made by the hard drive companies, and
companies like Nidec make motors for HDDs.)

The doubly fixed ones, should be low friction, and not
make a bearing noise at shutdown. Yet, I have a POC here
that makes a noise at shutdown. And everyone who bought one
of those drives, got the same shafting. It sounds like the
motor is a low-end fixed-at-the-bottom motor. This is actually
the first FDB motor that ever made a noise, which in 2017
was a disappointing development (and not a one-off accident
either, it's a design change).

Caveat Emptor, and don't drink the Koolaid.

I've bought my last WDC for a while.

I'm waiting for when I'm really short on space, before
I go shopping again. If they want to play games with us,
well go right ahead, and I'll sit this dance out.

The details of my experience aren't important, and like
a weather report, I'll recommend "more frequent reading
of reviews from customers to spot lemons" as my generic
advice to you.

There were some discussion threads, where users noticed
Black and Green drives *having the same seek time*. This
is Not Right, and should not happen. Were lower-end drives
substituted for Black drives ? Well, read the reviews,
as I cannot police every drive model number here. I've noticed
some funny **** too.

I cannot say anything about the last two Seagate 4TB drives I
bought, because they're only used as backup drives, and
don't have a lot of service hours. Unlike previous
Seagate purchased, by some miracle, "they haven't been
behaving flaky". But 100-200 hours on a drive is nothing,
and who knows what will happen next week.

My "champ" drive at the moment, is a Seagate ST3500418AS
with 38,964 Power On Hours. If I run an HDTune transfer
curve, there isn't a mark on the drive, neither are
there Reallocated sectors logged yet. Truly a miracle.
(I have plenty of other Seagates here that belong in
the Rogues Gallery.) And that one doesn't park the heads
either, so it's been flying heads the whole time. I
guess someone at the factory, "washed his hands before
he assembled that one" :-) It's too bad all the drives
couldn't be like that.

Â*Â* Paul

Great drives, I have 2 of the same ST3500418AS, one in each machine
about 23,000 hrs on each, same results, no bad blocks or relocated
sectors on these either, Really quite and running at 32 deg. C.

Rene