I am comparing two 4TB WD Red Plus, 3.5", CMR:
one with 64MB cache and one with 128MB cache.

The first is older (2013) and more expensive (+40CHF), but has a 3-year warranty,
The second came out this year and only has a 2-year warranty.

Is there a good reason to take the hard drive with 64MB cache, apart from the fact that it has 1 year more warranty?

Question

I am comparing two 4TB WD Red Plus, 3.5", CMR:
one with 64MB cache and one with 128MB cache.

The first is older (2013) and more expensive (+40CHF), but has a 3-year warranty,
The second came out this year and only has a 2-year warranty.

Is there a good reason to take the hard drive with 64MB cache, apart from the fact that it has 1 year more warranty?

Accepted Answer

Speaking for the 2013 efrx (old wd-red, now re-labelled as wd-red-pro, CMR), mine have yet to annoy me.  The WD40EFRX was known as _the_ known good among the new garbage marketed as WD-RED in the SMR scandal. Whereby good is relative: reasonable failure rate even with RAID use, with acceptable performance and slightly cheaper in price than better disks.

I think the refresh is also OK. 

But in view of WD's information policy (SMR disks, especially the disaster of SMR disks in the WD-REDs and their almost complete uselessness for NAS/storage (except read-only archive use without RAID), incl. associated class-action law suite; i.e.: red pro are the possibly acceptable reds, new "only-reds" are SMR and to be avoided) I would rather let them hang out for another year and then read reviews.  Which explains the price. 

For ANY other size or series, however, I would (1) still look at Seagate's Iron Wolf, and (2) look at the chosen platters in the Backblaze harddrive stats. WD was kicked out of there for a reason (not only SMR) and has to work _*HARD*_ to regain trust...

And regarding the size of the disks: also look at the repair times, e.g. for arrays. A raid with 16TB disks is actually no longer repairable in a reasonable time with SATA.

About the warranty: WD itself claims on shop.westerndigital.com 3 years for all Red Pros, and therefore also for the EFZX (the other one is not mentioned there anymore).

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