[AaronG85]

Is one better than the other?

What are people running?

[Nimo]

the green is a desktop drive and the red a nas drive. the red is also 24/7.
im running wd av-gp because the red came later. but now i would prefer the red one.

[jaochoo]

What makes a drive a NAS drive vs. a Desktop drive?

[Jetster]

Reliability in a 24x7 environment

[SavellM]

The RED has vibration dampening called "3D Active Balance Plus" so when running multiple drives in a NAS environment you get greater life.
They run cooler, helping extend life and also keep the NAS itself cool.
They are lower in power.
They work really really well for constant streaming eg a Movie.
And they are designed to be on 24x7 unlike desktop drives.
They are designed to work in a RAID environment, which some drives have issues with and can drop out of the RAID.

Also the Greens have an issue where they park the heads I believe it was every 8seconds of none use.
In a server environment that is going to destroy the drives in no time.

If it was me, and if I was building my NAS now I would 100% get RED's.
And when my drives start to die I will 100% replace with RED's.

[AaronG85]

Awesome thanks for the feedback guys im going to spend the extra and get the red drives.

[TheV]

I was initially planning on getting Green drives but after I've heard about the parking problems I've decided to pay the premium and rather go for Red instead.
My 3TB Red just got delivered 2 minutes ago!

[Yokozuna]

I have 4 x WD 3TB Red drives in my QNAP NAS. Love them ! I previously had 4 x 1TB WD Greens.

The vendor claims the reds :
- Have a longer mean time between fail - 1,000,000 hours
- Can operate to a higher temperature than the Green

The Reds also have better stats for Power Dissipation
Read/Write 4.40 Watts
Idle 4.10 Watts
Standby 0.60 Watts
Sleep 0.60 Watts

Green Power Dissipation
Read/Write 6.00 Watts
Idle 5.50 Watts
Standby 0.80 Watts
Sleep 0.80 Watts

[SSDD]

For most users the largest differences are going to be the longer warranty and the 24/7 rating. Another key difference however is the inclusion of TLER. If you are using a hardware RAID setup (standalone RAID card, off the shelf NAS box, etc) this is critical to have. Here is a good review and feature comparison of the Red versus the Green drives.

[KraziJoe]

What makes a drive a NAS drive vs. a Desktop drive?

Marketing.

[SSDD]

Marketing.

Please don't spread misinformation. As was already posted in this thread the Red drives have a longer warranty, much higher MTBF, shock sensors, anti-vibration compensention, 24/7 rating, and a large list of other differences. Feel free to read any of the numerious reviews that have been out since July.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Wes...ull-Review
http://www.storagereview.com/western_dig...w_wd30efrx
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/weste...he-premium

[ArieS]

So, if I have something like that: Mediasonic 8 Bays
Can I have some Green drives and Red drives at the same time or do they need to be all the same?

[assassin]

If you are using software raid either is fine.

[SSDD]

So, if I have something like that: Mediasonic 8 Bays
Can I have some Green drives and Red drives at the same time or do they need to be all the same?

You can mix and match the drives without a problem that I can see. The Red vs Green really boils down to your useage (24/7 or intermittent), reliability requirements (warranty, MTBF, heat tolerance, etc), and if you are using hardware raid or not (TLER). If you are running a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) setup, then there is no problem with mixing and you will enjoy the use of the more dependable Red drives.

I'm not sure if that really answered your question, but here is a link to the forums for the enclosure.
http://forum.mediasonic.ca/viewforum.php?f=12

[assassin]

Even with software raid it spins down the drives when you aren't using them. So to me I am not going to start using or recommending red drives in this setting unless they are cheaper.