Storage (Hard Drives)

[Ewesirname]

I was looking at two types of hard drives for my system. One is a Western Digital Red Plus (WD101EFBX) and the other is a WD Blue (WD80EAZZ). I was wondering if the Red Plus would be more reliable and/or last longer since it is meant for a NAS. I know there are many variables that determine the longevity of a drive but just at a basic level, is one more beneficial than the other? I will not be setting up a NAS just using a main drive and then a mirrored drive for backup. I know a mirror is not a true backup but I'm not too concerned with that as it is just for movies and TV shows. Both the drives are CMR with the same amount of cache, the only difference is speed and storage size (which doesn't matter to me).

[tmsrxzar]

this is going to be highly opinion based but i will explain

i would not choose western digital at all; this is rooted back 20 years when every wd i bought died prematurely due to manufacturer defects
i cannot say this is still the case because i have not purchased wd in said 20 years

since that time i have been using seagate and outside of a raid failure i have not lost a drive (physical drive ok / raid broken); at the same time i never keep drives beyond 5 years so this could attribute to my success

based on my experience i would highly recommend seagate exos; as you can see this is completely opinion

[TheDreadPirate]

IMO, you will only get anecdotal experiences. My experience is the opposite of tmsrxzar. WD has been super reliable for me. Only one failure of their, at the time, brand new WD Raptor drive and a recoverable failure of another 250GB drive still under warranty.

Been using WD hard drives, almost exclusively, for 23 years so I'd say that is a pretty good track record. I have 7 WD hard drives ranging from 12 years old to 1 year old in various PCs. All except the WD Red Pro in my signature are 5 years old+.

Really, you can't go wrong with any of the big HDD makers. The only thing I suggest is to stay away from SMR drives. Depending on your setup and storage needs, I would opt for a few smaller hard drives over a singular humongous hard drive of the same capacity.