Which disk colour, green or black?

[Organground]

I'm speccing a fast audio software PC but need the (24GB) RAM to be able to read off large (thousands) numbers of audio files from the hard drive as quickly as possible. Does anyone know whether two WD Black Caviar 640GB disks in RAID0 would perform significantly better than two WB Green Caviar 1TB disks in RAID0 (similar price)? I gather that all things considered I would see faster read performance with RAID0 than RAID1, and am prepared to take the risk of disk failure. I also read somewhere that WD Black won't work with RAID1 or RAID5 due to some sort of built in error checking program.

Any other things to look for (heating, reliability, noise) of black vs green caviar?

I can't afford SSD or Velociraptors for the amount of storage I need, around 1TB.

Thanks a ton!

 

[Sleinous]

Wd black - performance

wd green - powers down when inactive

For your use go for the 64mb cached blacks

Greens are good for backup with their ability to stop spinning

 

[PCS]

WB black drives should be fine in RAID - I've not heard of these problem before, although I would not recommend RAID 0 - purely because of the risk of data loss being increased.

 

[Organground]

Thanks - in which case any idea how much better/faster the read performance (if any) would be of two black disks in RAID0 would be compared to two green disks in RAID0?

 

[Sleinous]

None existant but green drives apparenyly slow down below 7300 rpm with dlight insctivity which may make the black drives the better choice for you here.

 

[PCS]

The green drives operate a variable speeds, usually between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, whereas the black drives spin at a constant 7,200rpm. If you want RAID 0, you cant performance, so I wouldn't recommend green drives on RAID 0.

 

[Phoenix]

Hmm RAID isn't a very reliable method right now, you could consider a velociraptor HDD instead as it will provide a higher read/write speed than a caviar black.

 

[Organground]

Thanks guys for the suggestions.

I spoke to PCS this morning about upgrading from twin WD Greens to twin WD Blacks in RAID0 but they said the motherboard couldn't do RAID0 with the Blacks (something to do with being 6GB or something?) and I'd need to use Windoze to do the RAIDing which they didn't recommend. So it looks like it's gonna be two Greens after all. Budget won't really go as far as the Velociraptor 600GB plus it's a bit on the small side.

However, I could manage 4 of the standard non-WD 16MB cache 1GB drives in RAID10 configuration giving me 2GB storage if that's possible and safer than RAID0. Any final thoughts for fastest read times?

 

[Sleinous]

I think you mean 1TB drive?

And I guess they meant because they are 6gb/s drives, but you can plug them into 3gb/s slots, so no idea why that wouldnt work.