Any reason to purchase the WD Red PRO drives instead of the standard WD Red drives?

[G+_Austin Clark]

Any reason to purchase the WD Red PRO drives instead of the standard WD Red drives? Looks like the big difference is the warranty is bumped from 3 to 5 years. But is it work the extra money?

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

If you are going to use the drives in any sort of parity based array the Pros are very much worth the extra money.  They're recommended for RAID 6, 7, and ZFS RAIDZ 2 and 3.  That's why you'll see recent claims around online about RAID 10 being cheaper than RAID 6/7.  RAID 10 is cheaper because you can use cheap drives and not have the potential to loose and entire array due to a URE.

 

I know Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ isn't a believer yet that RAID 5 no longer makes sense.  It really doesn't tho, and if anyone does run a RAID 5 array on WD Red's, you should know that the array will likely never rebuild.  That's not to say RAID 5 shouldn't be used, because you can at least create a backup after a drive has failed, but I'd not expect that array to rebuild.  The exception being drives that are smaller than ~500GB.

 

If anyone is interested in learning as much as possible about it, I have a list of articles covering the subject on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/RiZccgAE

[G+_Steve Heistand]

I have 48 plain red drives of various sizes in a few raid6 boxes. (synology) all have been fabulous for many years. I dont let any drive get older then 5 years before I replace it. Ive had 1 (maybe 2) drives fail since I started getting red drives as soon as they were released. all within even the 3 year warranty. For me the pro isnt worth it.  This is my second round of all red and I love them.

[G+_Austin Clark]

Sorry for not explaining the purpose. I'm planning on build a qnap NAS box.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

Being me I'd have to ask what RAID type you plan to use?  For RAID1/10 WD Red is fine, for RAID 6/7 I'd want the WD Red Pro.