Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming 'Red' Drives in Store Components

I know that 'green' drives are recommended for the MD600, which is what I did and have had no problems so far, but I was noodling around the net the other day (always dangerous) and noted that an increasing number of reasonably priced 'red' drives (better for Raid than green?) are now available. Has anyone tried these drives in their store components? I'm most interested in MD600 experiences, if anyone has them. Thanks!

Simon

I thought green drives were NOT recommended as they have intellipower (sp?). I was under impression that it is enterprise only drives for Sooloos. Maybe that is only the Twin Store.

I just bought a Red Drive. Physically, it looks a little rough around the edges (literally). I am in the process of filling it up as a backup, as the drives on my NAS are showing signs of failure and I want to increase the capacity. So was also looking to use these new Red Drives. One thing I did notice is that on Newegg, there seem to have high degree of failed drive.

Hi,

'Green' drives are ok with the later Meridian 'Sooloos' stores ie. MD600 and MC600.

However, 'Green' drives will cause issues when used with the older Sooloos stores: StoreOne, StoreTwo, TwinStore, Ensemble etc.

Regards,
Carl

Hi

Depending on the planned use of your MDMS I would recommend different drives.

1. If you are going to have your drives running all the time, I would go for the enterprise drives. They are made for 24/7 operation.

2. If You switch off your MDMS between sessions I would go for the green drives. They are often a little bit cheaper than enterprise drives.

Best Regards, Per Nilsson, Sweden

Are there really people that shutdown their Sooloos after each use? Maybe if your going away, but beyond that, I wouldn't think that is real good. The TwinStore doesn't seem to be a system designed for shutting on and off between use.

Also, the Red drives are expressly made for NAS. A NAS is intended to be left on 24/7.

The sense I get from reading Western Digitals website is that the RED is an "in between" product. Enterprise drives are designed for corporate servers that have constant read/write cycles and 24/7 access. Based on my and other people NAS use, people will put let say, 300 Bluray movies on a hard drive and watch them possibly over a year (all 300 of them). So the read/write cycles are far less. I am not sure where a TwinStore would fall in there.

Please read the following article/benchmarks regarding the real technical 'beef' on the WD Red drives : WD Red Tech Review

I remain convinced that WD Red drives are a good fit for a home audio enthusiast who requires a large amount of home NAS storage for his ZFS and/or Linux MD servers.

Out of my 24 3TB drives , only about 4 are Red drives. None have failed so far. (touch wood). I am in the process of migrating my RAIDz1 backups to 6x3TB RAIDz2 backups. primary is already 6x3TB RAIDz2 (with SSD ARC cache for speedup).

Other than the longer warranty, is the lack of aggressive head parking and the TLER configurability. Remember most of home enthusiasts are not springing for the 2X enterprise drives anyway.

Hi Yetis

There is no problem in shutting down the MD600 between listening sessions. HermanAtHome who is using this method has been doing so for a long time. He also used this method when using TwinStore. No failed disks, no problems what so ever. I do also trust HermanAtHome on this judgement when he has been working in the computer branch for around 35 years and has a great deal of experience of computer systems operating 24/7/365.

I let my TwinStores run 24/7 but that's because I want my Sooloos to be ready whenever I feel for music.

Best Regards, Per Nilsson, Sweden