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Looking for a suggestion on the most cost effective sata drives for a new raid 5 enclosure. I've lost track of who is left in the industry, and green vs blue vs fucia coloured drives... I don't know the difference. Coles notes summary?

For those interested, plan is the wiebetech Rtx430-3qr enclosure.

I have a preference for WD. Fewer of those have failed on me compared to Seagate and Maxtor. I've hardly had enough of them for the failures to be statistically significant though. Oh, I also like the WDs because they ran quieter than the others. This may have changed.

I find myself always buying the Seagate Barracuda since they always seem to be the most inexpensive for the capacity I want. I've bought a dozen or so over the years and have never had a problem with them.

Hey Chris,

WD seem to have NAS ready drives - I have read over the years you don`t want to put Green drives into NAS devices. I have used WD and Seagate over the years and have had one of each fail so they are pretty reliable.

What kind of NAS did you get?

Been in the industry for years and, barring the odd batch issues, failure rates are pretty much identical.

My home RAID enclosure has 5 x 2TB WD green drives.

Jamesy, the enclosure will be connected to my desktop as estata or usb3.0, so it won't be functioning as a nas. I'm not sure if getting a nas rated drive would make a difference.

Samsung F-series are probably the best HDD on the market. Super reliable!

I believe it is the WD Red drives that are NAS ready. I haven't used them myself as of yet.

More than 10 years ago we were a Seagate shop and had the drives fail every few months on our production servers. So that has set my mind to WD since. I currently have 4 external WD drives at home and 1 has failed in less than 2 years. So now I think I just might spend my money on the cheapest drives if no one is going to have any regards for quality.

I would just go with green or blue WD. You want a less speed and less heat drive. failure can come with any drive. Just I find WD more reliable.

A WD harddrive that I bought a month ago has an USB socket that doesn't work on all the USB cables that comes with their drives. It only works with 1 of their USB cables and it isn't the one that came with the drive. So out of the 4 WD drives that I bought within the last 2 years, I got 2 bad drives. That gives a 50% failure rate in a life span averaged out for 1 year.

In my opinion you should buy samsung spinpoint or WD blue (don't buy the green because will be slower) [almost always samsung is chaper so i'll prefer samsung].

I don't recommend Segate as few of my Segate HDD brak down...

(In last few years i bought few Samsung SpinPoint [some SpinPoin't are also slower like a wd green] and non of them break down - all working till today)

I agree with you, these are great drives. I use 2 x 2tb drives in my NAS and they have have performed great especially living in a condo where my power flickers more than I like it to.

+1. I have over six of these in use in my NAS and media servers and have only had issue with one of them that was caused by heat build up in one of my boxes - not Seagate's problem.