WD Black or Gold for Gaming (10TB)

[Black Flag]

After five years it's time to replace my main gaming hdd, the WD4005FZBX edition.

But it's not easy to find the Black model with 512 MB cache and 10 TBs of capacity, here in Greece and when I finding it, costs a lot.

So it's ok to go with WD103KRYZ Gold Enterprise? It's faster than the WD4005FZBX I already own.

 

[Solaris17]

Yeah it will work fine. It’s gonna make noise though so don’t get scared.

 

[Frick]

I'n gonna say it's high time for an NVMe SSD, for the modern games anyway.

 

[Black Flag]

Thanks for your answers.

I've already have nvme ssd for OS. I don't play latest demanding games often. Indiana Jones runs great. So I will spend money for nvme gaming later.

I'm aware that are noisy HDDs, but they're reliable at least. I tend to replace HDDs in 4 or 5 years of usage.

 

[Frick]

Games don't even have to be demanding. Some games (World of Warcraft for instance) are pretty atrocious on HDDs. Starfield is nigh unplayable on HDD apparently.

 

[nomdeplume]

I've already have nvme ssd for OS. I don't play latest demanding games often. Indiana Jones runs great. So I will spend money for nvme gaming later.

If you need 10TB for mostly older games. Go for the Gold and (if your mobo has second full speed M.2) keep your eye out for acceptably high quality 500GB or larger NVME for small money. Something with a decent warranty suggesting it will stand up to the TBW rating if you change games installed on it regularly. Even older games.

 

[Black Flag]

Not exactly old. I have purchased about 400 games (GoG, Blizzard, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft) and I want to have them all installed. Some are old. But many are new. I also have a DOS gaming collection and Windows 3.x - 9x.

 

[GenericNinja]

Thanks for your answers.

I've already have nvme ssd for OS. I don't play latest demanding games often. Indiana Jones runs great. So I will spend money for nvme gaming later.

I'm aware that are noisy HDDs, but they're reliable at least. I tend to replace HDDs in 4 or 5 years of usage.

Are you replacing this WD 10 TB due to age? Because preventively replacing a modern hard drive in a very low stress use case like a gaming drive without any signs of failure like SMART warning or a new clicking sound during operation makes no sense for your wallet or the environment.

 

[azrael]

After five years it's time to replace my main gaming hdd, the WD4005FZBX edition.

But it's not easy to find the Black model with 512 MB cache and 10 TBs of capacity, here in Greece and when I finding it, costs a lot.

So it's ok to go with WD103KRYZ Gold Enterprise? It's faster than the WD4005FZBX I already own.

In case you're not aware of it WDs Gold series is optimized for RAID, which means they use a somewhat different firmware than "regular" desktop drives. Same with the Red series. In essence, the drive will give up very quickly when an error is encountered. The RAID controller is supposed to handle that.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using a Gold series disk. I'm merely pointing something out that you should be aware of. FWIW, I'm using an 8 TB WD Red in my system for data as well. But, as others have pointed out, you really should get an NVMe disk for games.

BTW, in the olden days you could make the HDDs more quiet at the cost of a little bit of performance loss by altering the Automatic Acoustic Management setting of the drive. Sadly, that's not really possible any longer. At least not with WD drives.

 

[Ruru]

I'n gonna say it's high time for an NVMe SSD, for the modern games anyway.

10TB SSD is still hella lot more expensive than 10TB HDD. I'm pretty sure that OP knows what he/she is doing.

 

[Macro Device]

If you're ONLY about to store games on this HDD I'd go for literally whatever CMR drive you can find for cheapest. Not much sense in purchasing high-end HDDs for this task, you're better off combining an SSD for newer games and an HDD for older ones. Especially if you have loads of RAM.

Good quality SSDs tend to live for longer than HDDs anyway.

 

[Chomiq]

Honestly? Get a 2 TB NVMe for modern games wait, just checked your system specs, you're still on FX? Maybe 2 TB SATA ssd would instead of NVMe and 8 TB WD Blue or something for long time storage. Best of both worlds.

 

[Megatron]

I have a KRYZ 10 TB 512MB cache., paid £266 for it 3 years ago. Used for backups, page file (64GB ram) and radeon relive game capture.

 

[GerKNG]

just my two cents.
i use SSDs since they exist for consumer PCs.
my PC has two 990 PROs and one T705 Gen 5 SSD. Besides that i have a couple of HDDs including one that is actually in 24/7 use. A 12 TB Ironwolf from a couple years ago.

if you have a MODERN! CMR HDD it is actually fine to play modern games that "require" SSDs... Sure the loading times are longer but on my 12 TB Ironwolf, every single game runs fine after loading in.
Direct Storage actually does a favour to HDDs since it just does stream one big file that your GPU/CPU decompresses.
get the best CMR Drive you can buy for a reasonable price and as long as you're okay with waiting a minute instead of 15 seconds it will work just fine in almost every game available.

 

[Psychoholic]

Yeah it will work fine. It’s gonna make noise though so don’t get scared.

I love that noise.. Kinda miss it.

 

[nomdeplume]

Not exactly old. I have purchased about 400 games (GoG, Blizzard, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft) and I want to have them all installed. Some are old. But many are new. I also have a DOS gaming collection and Windows 3.x - 9x.

A number likely to continue growing.

Already being happy with how games run on current HDD. Potential impact of minor differences between it and replacement seems to be the largest concerning factor. FWIW the old WD Black 4TB WDBLSA0040HNC are still sought after. Maybe idea to add a second HDD is worth considering.

 

[Prime2515102]

Are hard drives still a bottleneck these days? Seems there is a lot of processing going on that prevents them from being so. I know this is the case with SSD's. I've doubled my SSD speed in the past with no tangible difference in performance. I know my system is old, but it doesn't get any faster than instant (at least perceptually so). Games that take forever to load might be a different story, but I've noticed no difference in load times with most games.

 

[Red Hood]

Are you replacing this WD 10 TB due to age? Because preventively replacing a modern hard drive in a very low stress use case like a gaming drive without any signs of failure like SMART warning or a new clicking sound during operation makes no sense for your wallet or the environment.

Agreed

If your current hdd is working fine then keep it

 

[A Computer Guy]

Are you replacing this WD 10 TB due to age? Because preventively replacing a modern hard drive in a very low stress use case like a gaming drive without any signs of failure like SMART warning or a new clicking sound during operation makes no sense for your wallet or the environment.

Unless it also happens to be a good reason to use the old drive as a backup drive. (assuming a backup is not already available)

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Are hard drives still a bottleneck these days? Seems there is a lot of processing going on that prevents them from being so. I know this is the case with SSD's. I've doubled my SSD speed in the past with no tangible difference in performance. I know my system is old, but it doesn't get any faster than instant (at least perceptually so). Games that take forever to load might be a different story, but I've noticed no difference in load times with most games.

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, if you are playing games which utilize a lot of loading or quick transitions you'll absolutely notice switching from an HDD to an SSD. My favorite example is Fallout 3 and 4. Transitioning from any one tile set to another requires everything to load into memory, so you can be going from a brown-grey wasteland into a brown-grey particle heavy god ray infested ruin that will take 30+ seconds to load on a hard drive while the SSD basically finished loading the textures while the door swinging animation plays out.


This is far less of an issue going from something like a gen 2 to gen 3 SSD because the difference is milliseconds instead of seconds...but try using an old hard drive and you'll appreciate that a connection from the last decade is significantly better.



Regarding the OP's situation, I have a novel approach. Install the games onto the HDD. Install the launchers onto the SSD. Copy and paste the redistributable folder for the games whenever you want to play them from the HDD onto the SSD. Delete once done, to keep the need for an SSD low. Subsequently buy a high endurance SSD because 10+ GB transfers aren't great...but are infinitely better than the frankly shocking price of non-volatile storage these days.

 

[agent_x007]

Not sure how much space you have on SSD-style drives, but if you own many AAA/AA games since ~2020+ age, those likely have SSD at least in recommended specs (for good reason, mentioned above).
Those types of games also weigh most in GBs. Again don't know how many of ~100GB games you own, but keeping them ALL on SSDs is very inefficient and wasteful (as I highly doubt you play ALL of them at the same time). Also, keep in mind that each write cycle means getting closer to memory failure and that's put into overdrive when memory cell used count goes up (since less free space = less opportunities for SSDs to optimize it's internal cell usage and/or manage wear level).

Assuming you have bad internet connection (downloading games takes too long/is too costly), keeping them all locally on HDD is a good solution. However, I don't think 10TB is going to cut it in ~5 year timeline you have

I recently bought HDD (new), however instead of "Black" or "Blue", I went straight to DC :


And almost two year ago. I got myself a different drive (from Seagate) :

Note : Neither of those drives was even "current gen" when I got them, this is 2020 tech basically (but still bought new, with 5 year warranty).

Not sure what prices you have in Greece, but instead of focusing on performance (which is redundant at least in this price tiers for a gaming library), I think you should focus more on capacity overall and warranty side of things. The most important thing is however cost per GB (GB/$).
In my case, for ~25-33% more money I got +50% capacity minimum (vs. 12-14TB range), which I think is pretty good deal (and should last longer than smaller capacity and cheaper option). Everything depends on your budget though.

PS.

Not exactly old. I have purchased about 400 games (GoG, Blizzard, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft) and I want to have them all installed. Some are old. But many are new. I also have a DOS gaming collection and Windows 3.x - 9x.

For your wallet sake, please try to uninstall stuff you won't play in long while BEFORE getting new hard drive/SSD.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I strongly recommend against an HDD for gaming, of any sort, targeting games of any age nowadays. Spinners are just good for bulk data storage, honestly.

I have a 4TB Red Plus on my rig right now, it holds my files and recorded gaming footage, I've tried running Zenless Zone Zero off it once and it... just was jarring. It's so bad I'm never doing it again.

 

[ir_cow]

Gold all the way. It's the only thing I use now. So many dead consumer HDDs. Gold series pays for itself. Only downside is the clicks are loud.

 

[Tomgang]

Yeah i can confirm as well. Wd gold are fast for a hard disk but also fairly noisy. So noisy that after i got a 14 tb gold, the rest of my storage drives are wd red pro. More silent but a little slower.

Gold drive never park the read heads, so you will hear i Click all the time even at ilde. So if noise sensitive. Up you might want something else. Heck i think maybe even my old wd veloci Raptor 10000 rpm drives was more silent than my current gold drive.

For games i do not recommend a hdd. Besides long load times you can experience lag and slow downs as a harddisk can't keep up with the data demand modern games needs. Its not for more and more games has a ssd as system demand. In short a hdd for modern games you Arent in for a good time. Get ssd for modern games. You can thank me later....

 

[chrcoluk]

Are hard drives still a bottleneck these days? Seems there is a lot of processing going on that prevents them from being so. I know this is the case with SSD's. I've doubled my SSD speed in the past with no tangible difference in performance. I know my system is old, but it doesn't get any faster than instant (at least perceptually so). Games that take forever to load might be a different story, but I've noticed no difference in load times with most games.

They are yes, you will notice it for a lot of things, but easy to forget now as most people use SSD for everything aside from maybe storage of media and archiving.
Spindle to SATA SSD, really noticeable massive upgrade to experience, games like FF15 when launched had massive multi minute loading screens, with a SSD (even SATA) and a good CPU to drive the data speed, its down to about 3-10 seconds now.
SATA SSD to NVME is noticeable but to a much smaller degree for mainstream usage, my observation of when I would say its needed is for games optimised for it aka direct storage, and for media processing. Also if you have a gigabit+ internet connection for steam downloads a NVME keeps up whilst a SATA doesnt.

For the topic at hand, standard WD reds have for the most part served me well for desktop use, I prefer 5400rpm drives, as they are a lot quieter and more power consumption friendly. Although all my recent spindle purchases which have been for my NAS are 7200rpm drives as thats all there is on large drives, I brought 2 seagate ironwolf pro drives, and two wd red plus drives. I expect the only difference of note for practical purposes is the warranty length, but I found it hard to justify as the wd golds have a huge premium. The vast majority of my drives tend to last until I obsolete them. Bear in mind the WD store, every time I have asked they will discount the red plus drives, but gold is a refusal. So that makes the price differential even higher. WD red plus's also have favourable noise, power metrics over gold.