Hey thought i would start this thread as i am always curious about things involving my hard drives as they hold all my content i recieve through NzbDrone so perhaps if like myself anyone has any questions or tips about hard drives involving some of the following
Troubleshooting
Which Drives to Buy
New Drives Available
and any other question or comment you have
I will try and answer what i can but i am no expert but if anyone knows the answer and can help someone out please do
I will start with the First question
With the New WD Red Drives should i enable the Power management to spin down the drives after a set period or should they be left spinning they will draw an little extra power but no waiting for drives to spin up seeing as these drives are designed to run 24/7 i would assume i could disable the power management feature and when they are not being used they will spin even slower to reduce power but not all the way spun down so it require spinning up again which adds to your Load Cycle Count
What are peoples thoughts on this do you spin your drives down WD Reds or Not
I just use wd greens , Never had a problem with them. I only just found out that there are now 6tb drives on the market. For me over here in nz 3tb wd greens are still the most reliable and cheapest way to go.
Sorry it doesn’t answer your question lol.
yeah that’s cool you are in NZ and I am in Australia so we have similar markets they do have larger drives i did not know about 6TB that is cool the highest i have seen is 4TB here
However currently the 3TB is a better deal there is just too much of a price increase for and Extra 1TB by going with the 4TB Version so the 3TB are the ones to go with
my current drives are all WD Greens whilst they have not given me any trouble if i buy more i might just buy the reds just because i can and they seem to have been designed to last a little longer hence the extra year warranty they wouldnt offer that if it was simple a Re-badged Green drive even though i don’t use raid i might still use them for a JBOD setup with Windows
I actually buy the wd 3tb notebook , take it apart and take the drive out , for some reason i can buy them cheaper this way than buying the drive by itself.
Can buy 6tb wd or seagate drives for $748 over here lol
yeah i have done similar thing when the thai floods happened and the drives went sky high i bought a bunch of 2TB WD Elements from Officeworks they hadn’t caught on and raised the prices yet so got them cracked them open and use them they are just WD Greens Inside anyways 
Its because the warranty isn’t as long. Usually only 1 year.
I once read that the drives that go into the external drives are more likely to have defects (the error tolerence to use them there is less strict), not sure how true that is, but I’ve done the same thing and so far so good.
I just had my first SSD drive fail , Purchased it 4 years ago and has been the os drive of my media center (Windows 7), it runs 24/7 and was a Phoenix pro 60gb from G.Skill.
Swapped it our for a new 120gb ADATA and had to go through the drama of a clean install which sucked , had a backup of all my data for drone and sab though.
some basic redundancy is always much more preferred
I’m using UnRAID, which helps with individual hard drive spin down, and also fault tolerance.
win/win 