Red versus Green

[drew]

So, the "green" drives are for eco-friendliness/etc, while the "reds" are marketed towards NAS/24-7 use.

All things considered, for my use (meaning, pulling movies from the drives and recorded TV), are the reds worth the premium in cost?

The cost difference is negligible, to a point (WD just released a 6TB monster for $300...)

Is there really any difference, for what I intend to do with them?

[Yw-slayer]

The Greens have a crapper warranty and are slightly slower.

If you have the dough, why not splash out on the Reds?

[Mr Wonder]

I have a couple of black, two greens and got a red last year. The red is slightly faster but more importantly it seems to "wake up" quicker and stays awake longer, the greens take a few seconds to spin up and become readable.
I'd go with the red for the small price premium.

[drew]

I may transplant the 4TB green I just got a couple weeks ago into the main box, and stuff the HTPC with reds.

I won't lie that I'm very tempted by the 6TB drive.

[thesameguy]

AFAIK, the only difference between the Green and Red drives are the Green drives have specific firmware designed to fuck up RAIDs, and the Red drives don't. WD calls it "aggressive power saving," but that has always been a software setting in the past, and it's just not on the Green drives so they tend to blow up RAID arrays. For a lone drive, might as well go Green, you really don't win much with Red IMHO. If you don't have long-term ownership aspirations, you might also look at Seagate. Their drives aren't as reliable (statistically speaking), but they are pretty cheap. I wouldn't hesitate to count on one for two to three years. I do. :D

As for size, the best bang for the buck right now is the 4tb drives. You pay a big premium for the > ones - not sure it's really worth it unless you have an immediate need for the space. IME, you're always better off buying storage that's just slightly bigger than what you need and no more. Refresh in a couple years when you need more space, and that way you don't end up having to run consumer drives past their 36mo optimal reliability window.

[drew]

Interesting. Considering I don't really have any aspirations on using RAID, it's probably just a $ thing now. As far as that goes, I have 5 SATA headers available on the board, so just with that alone, that gives me a potential of 20TB, which I will probably never need anyway.

At present, I've got a 4TB for movies/BD rips (those can certainly assrape a harddrive in a hurry) and a 1TB as the "DVR" drive. Both are green. The 1TB I've had for probably 3 years or more, it was my main HDD in the box (connected to the same mobo it is now).