Western Digital AV Drives - Anyone Using Them?

[Savage1701]

I'm curious about the WD AV series of drives. I know they write slowly relative to most drives in their class.

I am, however, interested in anyone's experiences with them both recording and playing back multiple HD streams.

Thanks for any comments.

[Ender]

I recently replaced my two segate 7200.11 1TB drives with two 1 TB AV-GP drives, and for my purposes, and I have not seen an issue with them.

I have recorded up to three HD streams at once, while watching one, and having comskip run on two others.

The only tweak I did besides format in 64k clusters was to disable drive indexing on the drives.

[Savage1701]

Thanks Ender; interesting to know. I should have stated that I always disable indexing as well.

I'm just not sure what noticeable advantage these drives offer, unless it's the ability to truly run cooler in tight spaces for extended periods of time.

Thanks again.

[src666]

I moved to them a few months ago when I upgraded to 2TB drives. So far they seem to be fine. I have 9 tuners, but max simultaneous load so far has been around 5 - 3 HD and 2 SD.

I have seen a few "glitches" during playback while recording multiple channels and viewing at the same time, but nothing too bad, and very few glitches in the recordings themselves.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by src666

I moved to them a few months ago when I upgraded to 2TB drives. So far they seem to be fine. I have 9 tuners, but max simultaneous load so far has been around 5 - 3 HD and 2 SD.

I have seen a few "glitches" during playback while recording multiple channels and viewing at the same time, but nothing too bad, and very few glitches in the recordings themselves.

Hmmm. I'd consider any recorded glitches a problem in my setup, but perhaps my tuners are just really good.

[Savage1701]

OK, well that's good to know. On balance, there does not seem to be any real advantages or disadvantages to these specific drives.

I know they bench relatively poorly in reviews, but I have yet to find a review site that specifically reviews a drive's ability to read and write multiple video streams without issue, and if they are truly specialized for AV then why would anyone care if they launched Windows slower, right?

Anyway, thanks for the comments. I appreciate them.