WD Red as main drive?

alright I am going to replace my main drive as it has this stupid APM thing at firmware level that I cant shut off and it causes system hangs and all sort of other performance problems.

I was looking at the Reds and I was wondering if I would run into the same problem with them being mainly for NAS
how the performance on them otherwise

Performance is similar to the Greens, the difference being the Reds are better suited for use in RAID than the Greens. For performance from WD, you will want either a Blue or a Black.

Is this going to be your system drive, I would suggest getting an SSD and only put your OS and programs on it. For most people, a 120-128GB SSD will be plenty big, allowing enough overhead to ensure longer life. If you are a gamer, you may want to go to a bigger one. Once you have an SSD, you will never want to go back to a spinner for your OS. Your system will boot much faster and programs will load much faster.

oh its not going to be my OS drive tis going to be the main storage, steam and the like.

sorry where I figure most of the stuff I want to keep is the main drive and the OS drive is seperate

Niku-Sama said:

oh its not going to be my OS drive tis going to be the main storage, steam and the like.

sorry where I figure most of the stuff I want to keep is the main drive and the OS drive is seperate

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I built out a Synology DJ415 with 4 - 4TB WD Reds that were used mainly for streaming media. Drives were set as a the Synology Hybrid RAID, but 20GB BD rips would stream with no issues. Not sure how well it'll do with gaming though. But if you're serious about performance, spend the extra $$ and get a Black.

I've used 1-2TB WD Green drives without an issue for OS and Non-OS applications. Its still quick. Gaming isn't constantly hitting the drive so it should be fine. If it loads 1-2 seconds slower.. so be it.

Heck in my main rig still use a 640GB WD Black drive... I'd upgrade but tossed all my large drives into my Synology Box and not super desperate for space.

true games aren't hitting it constantly but right now the drive I have has APM at firmware level and no way to shut it off, even tried flashing firmware for other drives (i.e. OEM, internal, ect.) because this apparently at one time in its life was meant to be an external drive hence the different firmware with the APM.

well when I game "streams" textures in and out it goes to grab the next texture and hangs if it has to wait for the disc to spin up, or it causes a crash.... way annoying

Yikes... didn't think a drive would shut down if your using it like that. I know games aren't hitting it constantly but should be enough for read actions or minor writes to the drive to prevent it to sleep when in a game.

it does, and boy its annoying.

Seagate tech support says it was part of normal operation aswell.