Green HDDs

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937 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#416857 14-Dec-2010 00:22

Well I would certainly stay away from anything Seagate as have had my last two crap out quite quickly (one was a external pocket drive that wanted to take 14+ hours to transfer one 12gig file from my pc to the external drive so after giving it the benefit of the doubt left it overnight and still had 8hrs to go when I woke in the morning strangely enough took it back and got another WD).

I can't say I have actually had much luck with regard to my internal 1tb or bigger drives at all. In fact all except 1 1.5 Samsung one has failed at (way to regular to my liking) times. I had to remove one completely and put it in a external casing for it to be functional for anything more than a day (has been fully functional at all times since I placed it in the external casing). All of these drives have been the Samsung Green range with exception to a WD one.

I ended up recently just getting a new WD 1.5tb external drive amd now use that as a My Documents drive which has all downloads, movies, images and music on it. I stream all my content from this drive without any problems whatsoever. Best part i got it on sale at DSE (yes that's right they actually had a good price for once hehe) for $135 give or take $5.

I can not be sure how this would work for your recording needs. I think (although likely about to be proven wrong) that this would rely a lot on your cpu and gpu than the actual drives capabilities. As stated though I am most likely wrong and If so sorry hehe.

To sum up I think WD's are quite good and out of all my drives and have been through a lot over the last two years (over several machines i have to add) they have been the best performers of all.

Good Luck.

martyyn

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#417092 14-Dec-2010 14:35

mm1352000: Thanks for the comments folks.
Considering the number of warnings both here and elsewhere about WD greens

The problem is you only ever here about the failures, no-one posts a thread saying theyve had a drive for fives years without any problems. If you search for 'WD green problems' then thats all your likely to find and how many of these drives have been sold worldwide ?

Ive had two WD 1Tb green drives in my HTPC for nearly three years now (as have four of my friends). We all timeshift and record both dvbt and dvbs, they have the OS, mediaportal, our music, home movies and photos on them and weve never had a problem.

My two have now been in my server (which is 24x7) for six months and still no problems.

Im obviously clutching a rather large piece of wood as I type this ;)

richms

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#417100 14-Dec-2010 14:50

I have had none fail, but IMO they are too slow to be anything but an occasional backup you take offsite.

The seagates however, they have been a string of failures for me. Not tried samsungs yet, but will be getting a 1tb from computerlounge next week to replace the last green I have in use in a PC with non media on it.

Richard rich.ms

mm1352000

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#417103 14-Dec-2010 14:56

Yeah, don't let go of that will you!?!

Fair point, although I've also been reading general reviews. At the end of the day there is always a chance that any individual sample could be DOA, flake out, not meet requirements etc...

My Samsung F4's arrived a couple of minutes ago. Can anyone guess what I'll be doing tonight?

blur

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#417113 14-Dec-2010 15:19

Will be interested to hear what your thoughts are on the Samsung - please report back!

Regarding the people who have had good experiences with WD's Green drives, the only thing I have to say to that is once bitten, twice shy. My thoughts are that too many people have posted here on this site with similar problems for these to be dismissed as "user" type issues. There is clearly more to these drives than meets the eye.

And besides, what's with the whole "green" thing anyway? It's a hard-disk for goodness sake! How many trees do you think you have saved by choosing the green drive VS the others???

Probaby none!

My HTPC - Case Antec Fusion Remote, MOBO Intel DH67BLB3, CPU Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, RAM 8GB DDR3 1333, HDD 120Gig Corsair Force Series 3 SSD system | WD Caviar Black 2TB data, Tuners Black Gold BGT3595 dual DVB-S/S2, dual DVB-T, Video nVIDIA GeForce GT 520, 1024MB, Sound Intel® High Definition Audio (onboard), OS Windows 7 x64

mm1352000

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#417120 14-Dec-2010 15:29

Will definitely report, but obviously some issues (probably the most important ones) will only rear their ugly heads given time...

Regarding the "green" name: there are measurable power savings. No comment as to whether that would translate into a tree or two over their entire lifetime. I'm only choosing them because the 7200rpms are outrageously more expensive or unavailable for the larger HDD sizes that I need...

hads

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#418017 16-Dec-2010 10:47

I've got half a dozen WD Green drives installed around the place.

Some used for recording (SD only currently) and happily record 4 streams at once and play back a couple.

No issues with failures or speed.

I wouldn't use them for an OS drive unless I had to (use an SSD) they are certainly fast enough for storing media.

I imagine a lot of people that have issues with them are using the newer EARS 4k ones and don't have them formatted correctly.

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mm1352000

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#418024 16-Dec-2010 10:54

Good point. Could well be true :)

dolsen

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#418036 16-Dec-2010 11:09

I'm using a wd green hdd with advanced format successfully in my xp pro machine and have been for perhaps a year. This was a drive that was in an external case that I picked up for $99 at dse when it was on special. I knew about the advanced format issue so I re-formatted it in windows 7, then added it to my dynamic disk in xp that I use for recording tv to. Once I did that, I had major issues with stuttering etc.

I broke the dynamic disk, then used wd-align tools to set up the boundary correctly. I thought that formatting it under win 7 would have meant this was set up correctly, but, this was not the case. Once the disk was aligned, I created a new dynamic disk.

The dynamic disk is ~1.6TB. It's made up of a 640GB + 1TB drive, both wd drives. The 1TB is a wd green drive with advanced formatting. It has about 1.2TB on the drive, not partially fragmented I'd say (haven't checked the fragmentation, but, it's never been really full).

I have no issues with stuttering recordings (other than the very occasional drop out which is signal related). It is not uncommon to be recording tv1, tv2, tv3 and playing back tv3 at the same time (terrestrial, HD).

So, set up correctly, there does not seem to be any issues with a wd green drive. Not set up / aligned correctly, I have seen significant issues with the performance making it unusable.

blur

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Ultimate Geek

#418043 16-Dec-2010 11:18

You know, reading this thread there is no doubt that people have had some success with WD Green drives, but this has come about with a lot of trial and error, and effort.

Call me cynical, but I do put value on my time. Reading this thread just makes me think - "who can be bothered?"

I'm quite prepared to do a little research and pay a little extra.

The other point that might be worth noting is that the majority of people who have had success have all used these drives as stand-lone media drives, and have not been running the OS and applications off the drive also.

Could there be someting in this?

fahrenheit

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#418079 16-Dec-2010 12:51

I bought my NAS and WDEARS 2TB drive at the end of August and right out of the box, you can see the Load Cycle Count begin to climb rapidly. This is just after 4 hours of uptime -

These drives are rated for 300,000 head parks for the life of the drive, but they are set to park every 8 seconds by default.

After changing the setting from its default 8 seconds, you can see that the rate of parking is dramatically altered -

This is how it looks today after about three and a half months of uptime -

Had I not changed anything and just left the drive to behave as it did out of the box, that LCC would be greater than 80,000. Thats a fairly big whack of a 300,000 rating.

Of course thats just a number and there are plenty of people who are running these with over a million parks and still have their all their data. But the fact remains, this is extremely concerning and brings up questions of whether WD are putting their powersaving marketing bulletpoints ahead of their longterm reliability.

Its not just the Green drives either. My 500GB BEVT blue laptop drive also had its default count at 8 seconds.

There are plenty of happy WD owners in this thread it seems, but how many of you have looked at your S.M.A.R.T. data and bothered to note your LCC?

Would this stop me from buying WD drives? Well, no. I put noise above power saving and thats an area that the Samsung and Segate and Hitachi's can't match. Samsungs come close but not close enough for my liking.

blur

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Ultimate Geek

#418270 16-Dec-2010 21:09

"...These drives are rated for 300,000 head parks for the life of the drive, but they are set to park every 8 seconds by default."

I couldn't help but notice the above in the previous thread. This has to be a load of rubbish, doesn't it?

Let's do the math on this:

300,000 head parks every 8 seconds:

300,000 * 8 = 2,400,000 seconds for the life of the drive

2,400,000 /60 = 40,000 minutes

40,000 / 60 = 666 hours (Iron Maiden anyone?)

666 / 24 = 27 days

So what you are telling me is that they DEFAULT, out of the box, to a rates life of a month (give or take)???

Well, I'm sold!!!

fahrenheit

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#418285 16-Dec-2010 22:09

blur: "...These drives are rated for 300,000 head parks for the life of the drive, but they are set to park every 8 seconds by default."

I couldn't help but notice the above in the previous thread. This has to be a load of rubbish, doesn't it?

Let's do the math on this:

300,000 head parks every 8 seconds:

300,000 * 8 = 2,400,000 seconds for the life of the drive

2,400,000 /60 = 40,000 minutes

40,000 / 60 = 666 hours (Iron Maiden anyone?)

666 / 24 = 27 days

So what you are telling me is that they DEFAULT, out of the box, to a rates life of a month (give or take)???

Well, I'm sold!!!

No no, I'll try and explain it better.

The drive is ratedfor 300,000 head parks over its lifetime. That is the number they give for reliable operational life.
The heads are set to park after 8 seconds of being idle. If the OS is querying the drive it could park and then unpark (cycle) the heads every 8 seconds.

So not a month, but in the worst case scenario, you could blaze through those 300,000 parks in less than a year.

dolsen

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#418297 16-Dec-2010 22:31

Hmm, useful information. From my WDC WD10EADS-11M2B2 drive,

Start/Stop Count 89
Power On Time 5762
Power Cycle Count 43
Power off Retract Count 30
Load/Unload Cycle Count 22631

I see a reconfiguration coming...

richms

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#418306 16-Dec-2010 23:18

Hmm, my 2tb is at 83000, yet the vastly older 1tb that I have torrents running on all the time is on 919, the 1tb that was my OS drive is 23000.

I cant see the others because the cheap PCI silicon image card I have doesnt seem to let smart work. I would try reflashing with the plain IDE bios instead of the fakeraid one, but the tools dont want to know about it.

Richard rich.ms

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