Caviar Green VS Caviar Black [ Edited ]

[sepukacheekray]

Soon I'm gonna purchase a startech 4 hard drive enclosure for archiving video for the school I'm an intern with. It's USB 3.0 and sata 6/Gbs, and I was looking at cramming 4 2TB caviar blacks in there, but that is mighty expensive. Would I really need the blacks for simply archiving this data? I will also be doing very light editing of the videos, i.e. Intro, cutting out gaps, outtro, making suitable for upload to online school etc. Nothing too fancy, this setup is mainly for archiving, as we'll have a massive amount of video data to store. Would 3TB caviar greens work for this just as well as the blacks? Currently we're running a Mac mini (I know, small ministry training school with a very limited budget) but in the future we'll upgrade to a windows PC that has USB 3.0 and the power to actually edit videos and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Thanks for your help!

[FailedHDDs]

- Greens, are good,
- Blues, are also good,
- Blacks are better, (performance wise)
but depending on how the config. of the Startech box is setup
you may have to use RE (RAID Edition) Enterprise drives in it WD

desktop HDDs (Green, Blue, Black) are only recommended for non-RAID application
they can be attached to a RAID capable SATA controller
but should be run in non-RAID JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) mode
and accessed individually as separate disks / volumes

if you are planning on using the RAID function of the box (if it has it)
then you'll need to use RE disks if you plan on using WD disks in it

[sepukacheekray]

Sorry I didn't put this before, the box has raid functionailty, and I'm gonna raid them together in probably raid 1+0.
The unit is the 4 Bay External Hard Drive Array RAID Tower – eSATA USB 3.0 Enclosure.

This is what the unit description says about it's raid functionality:

"The 4-bay RAID enclosure can be connected to the host/source computer through USB or eSATA and automatically builds your SATA RAID array based on your selection (Spanning, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 1+0, RAID 3, and RAID 5 supported), delivering a simple, yet flexible external storage solution."

So even though the unit can do this I'd still need the specialty disks?

[FailedHDDs]

Yes,
you'll need to use RE HDDs if you're planning to use WD disk in RAID
there are some exceptions,

see the following WDC help doc:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397/~/difference-between-desktop-edition-and-raid-%...

also note the "critical" section of the help doc:

"WD Caviar Black, Caviar Green, and Caviar Blue hard drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing. "