My WD blue is faster than my WD black??

[diluzio91]

so i was running some hdd benchmarks, and i found out that my wd blue drive beats my wd black in all the benches i used except access time, where it was 2ms slower.

WD blue:

WD black:

So why are the blacks so much more expensive??

[Blibbax]

It might be that one drive is based on older tech, or fuller, or fragmented, or something like that.

WD Blacks tend to be differentiated by much larger cache sizes.

[Kayin]

Blacks are also RAID capable, as I understand.

[mDust]

Are both disks empty? One could be writing/reading from the inside of the disk (which is faster) and the other from the outside edge (which is much slower). Or they could both be fragmented. Or they might be formatted in different allocation unit sizes. Or anything else could affect them differently.

I just did a quick bench on my 1TB Caviar Black and averaged 108/110 average sequential read/write...but it's in use and is about 20% full. The only way to get super accurate, comparable test results is averaging several bench tests on fully wiped disks that are never being accessed.

[simon275]

Blacks are also RAID capable, as I understand.

Hi well you can raid any western digital drives, non of the consumer drives support Time Limited Error Recover and WD recommends not raiding them. Time Limited Error Recover allows the drive longer to respond and supports error handling. You have to shell out for a RE2 which is basically the same as a black but with different firmware.

[Kayin]

WTF, they're missing TLER?

Another great reason to never buy them. TLER might be a server level concept, but lots of us run RAIDs and without it you lose data very easily.

I have Samsung F3s here for one RAID, but I also have a system I'm working on here that will blow RAIDed F3s (or even Raptors) out of the water. Just wish it weren't so much initial outlay. My job in years past included a LOT of RAIDs. I've worked on RAID-3 and RAID-6, I saw so many.

I really can't recommend any drives that have a chunk of firmware missing. Any drives could be raided given capacity, platter count, and speed matches until WD decided to charge more for a basic functionality. What is the world coming to?

[Blibbax]

I know lots of people running blue or green drives in raid arrays with no issues.

[mDust]

I know lots of people running blue or green drives in raid arrays with no issues.

I've never had any data loss issues with my caviar blacks or any other raid drives lacking TLER. For many years I kept a raid 0 C:. I only stopped because I kept having drives die, which got quite annoying. I was going to set up a 5 or 0+1 again but never got around to it...didn't seem worth it without a raid card...or ten SSDs.

[Kayin]

I've got a RAID10 setup here to assemble. Believe me, at that point TLER is your friend.

[x88x]

I don't think any of the drives in my RAID5 array (combo of WD Green's and Samsung F2's) have TLER, and I've never had a problem with them because of that. I've had one fail, but mdadm just told me that one of the disks had failed out of the array, I replaced it, and it automatically took care of it filling in what was supposed to be there. If it were a mission-critical system that would be a different matter (as would how I'm controlling the array), but for a home-use array with parity, I really don't think it's a problem.