WD harddrive, so many models, which one to pick?

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pstar008

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#32390 16-Apr-2009 11:31

Just doing a bit shopping online, looking for a good deal for SATA hard drive. Shall I care about different model names for WD hard drives?Carviar SE, WD3200AAJS, WD3200AVJS etc. ? what that suppose to mean, I didn't seems find difference according to the specification? Other manufactor like Seagate are much easier, I just pick the one with highest number I can afford like 7200.11 etc.

Also why some site like computerlounge didn't mention warranty at all for a hard drive, and some site like APlus only provide 12Month warranty? Personally I think warranty is on the high priority list, and shoudln't all warranty covered by manufactory, so if I got one failed in 1.5 years, shouldn't WD cover it if it has a 3 year warranty on their website?

Sorry for all these questions, I guess I am reaching the point the more research I've done, the more confuse I am getting.

CYaBro

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#207289 16-Apr-2009 13:02

AFAIK WD have 3 families of 3.5" SATA hard drives, Green, Blue & Black.

The Green models being better for power saving and quietness like using in a HTPC.
Blue is the standard drive and Black are the top with a 5 year warranty and 32MB cache etc.
The green & blue have a 3 year warranty.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

pstar008

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#207298 16-Apr-2009 13:26

CYaBro: AFAIK WD have 3 families of 3.5" SATA hard drives, Green, Blue & Black.

The Green models being better for power saving and quietness like using in a HTPC.
Blue is the standard drive and Black are the top with a 5 year warranty and 32MB cache etc.
The green & blue have a 3 year warranty.

Thank you for the information, that category acutally make sense, I guess the AV Series I am
looking at are sort of Green one and 1 Million MTBF is probably what I am looking for for a file
server.

Pskonejott

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#212178 4-May-2009 18:06

Check with the retailer as to the warranty, I just bought 7 WD green drives and the retailer offers 1 year warranty but stated the remaining 2 years is available directly with WD i.e. I need to return to file an RMA with WD NZ and return directly to them.

The drives that you have mentioned are the desktop drives, there are also enterprise drives RE2, RE3, RE4 (raid edition). They are built for continuous use etc, but they also have one very important feature, Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER). If your drive develops a bad sector that sector is remapped to one of the spare sectors, and the HDD will spend up to 30 seconds trying to repair the problem. Most raid controllers will drop a drive from the array if it does not respond for between 7 and 15 seconds, a drive with TLER enabled will only spend 7 seconds, then the raid controller takes over repairing the problem and the drive will not be dropped from the array requiring a rebuild. The good news is that you can download a DOS based tool called WDTLER that lets you switch TLER on and off, definately (actually, absolutely necessary) if you're intending to put the drives in something like a NAS.

rscole86

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#212179 4-May-2009 18:12

The retailer cannot get out of warranty periods that the manufacturer offers. The only exception being, is if they are parallel imported, or if the retailers warranty is better. Eg replace as opposed to repair etc

Pskonejott

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#212189 4-May-2009 18:39

I'm not sure what the exact deal is with this retailer, one of the 7 drives that I purchased was faulty and they told me to return it to them and they will do the return with WD (I bought the last 7 and they won't have more stock for some time). However this retailer was charging $302 for a 1.5TB drive and speaking with other retailers it seems they get the drives for $316 wholesale from WD NZ (they were offering me cost price to try and be competitive).