WD Black and Special Edition HDs

[crashnburn]

Hi,

Has anyone got any experiences or seen any good/bad reviews for Western Digital Black Edition and Special Edition hard drives. I'm looking at replacing a couple of drives that are rapidly becoming too small

[Phil]

I cannot speak to those specific models, but here's my experience for what it is worth.

I've several 1TB and 2TB WD MyBook Studio/Pro edition drives here, and a 1TB Buffalo unit containing Samsung disks - all running as RAID 1 units. After several dead 1 TB units from Western Digital, I would be extremely cautious of any of the 1 TB drives with the blue circle indicator - they run very hot (you cannot touch the disks if you open up the case) and in each failure, one of the disks failed without warning.
With RAID1, the idea is that you can keep running and suffer no data loss in this mode (with the intent of either replacing the whole unit later, or replacing the dead disk). When the 1 TB WD unit had a disk die, though, you would struggle to keep running - the unit would drop offline as soon as it realised a disk was dead. That gave you around 5 to 10 minutes of time in which to start offloading data to a replacement disk/unit. A full rebuild of the array took about 18 hours.

The WD 2 TB units have been completely solid. The Buffalo unit also has been reliable.

The one significant downside is that the fan-fitted WD units have a really high pitched whine when the fan comes on.....which is for around 18 hours if the array needs to be rebuilt. Ugh. The passively cooled unit doesn't have this problem, naturally, but if the unit runs hot, it will stop working until it cools down again.