WD Caviar Green - have they improved?

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blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek

#111731 13-Nov-2012 14:25

Hi Guys

It's getting to that time again where I am looking for more disk space. My current setup is a single seat installation with a 120GB SSD as the system drive, and I have a 2GB Western Digital Caviar Blak as my data drive.

I'd like to upgrade the 2TB to a 3TB drive, and was wondering what people's opinions' were on the Western Digital Caviar Green drives.

After having such a terrible experience with the 1TB Caviar Green previously, I swore black and blur that I'd never go back, but I have to say that the price is too appealing to discount.

So here I am - throwing it out to the community for their judgement.

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

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#716456 13-Nov-2012 15:00

Still aweful.

Friend has bought a few red ones and finds they dont keep getting chucked out of the raid, but I think thats the only benifit he sees, performance is still limited by his gutless computer doing the nas work.

Richard rich.ms

nzkc

1571 posts

Uber Geek

#716462 13-Nov-2012 15:05

I just had a second WD Green (2TB) drive fail - not completely but bad sectors for Africa. Both were bought at the same time and from the same store so may have been in a bad batch but it will take a lot to tempt me back to them.

I've just replaced it with one of these: http://www.playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139235/CATID=235/ID=16981/SID=594475460/productdetails.html

Sadly they're now out of stock from Playtech - but give them a call they're pretty helpful.

Looking at PriceSpy PBTech has them for under $150.

blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek

#716474 13-Nov-2012 15:19

nzkc: I just had a second WD Green (2TB) drive fail - not completely but bad sectors for Africa. Both were bought at the same time and from the same store so may have been in a bad batch but it will take a lot to tempt me back to them.

I've just replaced it with one of these: http://www.playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139235/CATID=235/ID=16981/SID=594475460/productdetails.html

Sadly they're now out of stock from Playtech - but give them a call they're pretty helpful.

Looking at PriceSpy PBTech has them for under $150.

I've bought hardware off both PlayTech and PB Tech and they are both quite good.

Based on the above I think I might err on the side of caution and run with a 3TB Seagate drive. Life's too short to be re-building drives after failures or trying to trouble-shoot issues that are caused by slow drives.

With the above siad, don't stop posting your Green drive stories though. I'm still keen to hear what people have to say about them. Hell, you never know, we might have someone say something positive!

RunningMan

8954 posts

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#716487 13-Nov-2012 15:36

blur:

With the above siad, don't stop posting your Green drive stories though. I'm still keen to hear what people have to say about them. Hell, you never know, we might have someone say something positive!

Well, just to be different, I got a 2TB WD Green from PBTech about 18 months ago. Hasn't missed a beat.

Digmarx

139 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#716491 13-Nov-2012 15:39

I have 4 WD 2TB Green drives in my home server running whs 2011. I've had 2 @ WD20EARS for ~2 years with no errors, and SMART is still showing them in pristine condition. I just bought 2 @ WD20EARX 2 months ago. At this point I'll gladly continue to buy WD Green drives. It should be noted that they aren't spec-ed to run in RAID arrays. They do a fine job serving video to my HTPC, though.

CYaBro

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#716493 13-Nov-2012 15:40

Why go from a nice decent performing WD Black drive to a slow Green drive?
Why not just add another driver rather than replacing?
Would help with defrags etc. and backing up.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

LookingUp

411 posts

Ultimate Geek

#716555 13-Nov-2012 16:57

Have had 4 WD 2TB Greens - 2 in a NAS box (not RAID) and one in a PVR Satellite decoder. One of the NAS drives died pretty early in the piece and was swapped - the other one and the replacement have been fine ever since.

The one in the PVR failed after ~ 12 months so I swapped it for a WD 2TB Black. Oddly the Black seems slower than the Green was (didn't expect that), and is also a lot noisier (did expect that).

So, of 3 Greens I had a couple of years back 2 are dead, and 1 and a replacement carry on. Not so sure I'd go there again.

Things are LookingUp.... A photo from my back yard :-)

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

meesham

973 posts

Ultimate Geek

#716559 13-Nov-2012 17:10

I've bought quite a few greens in the past, I currently have 2 RAID arrays with 5x 1TB drives (started around 3 years ago) and another with 5x 2TB (started 2 years ago). So far none of the 1TB drives have had any problems but I've had 3 of the 2TBs die (2 of which were bought at the same time, bad move I know). I've only bought 2 Seagate drives in the past couple of years and I've had one of them die, it's luck of the draw a lot of the time. After turning off the overeager head parking I haven't found the greens to be too bad, the arrays are just storing TVs & movies on one array and desktop system image backups on the other, so performance isn't super important.

CamH

564 posts

Ultimate Geek

#716560 13-Nov-2012 17:14

We've got 8x 1TB WD Green's in one of our short-term file servers which is used for anything from virtualization to file backup. Had it for about 2 years and never had a problem with any of them.

GBristow

178 posts

Master Geek

#716573 13-Nov-2012 18:03

I've had 2x2TB greens (WD20EARX) for about 15 months now. No issues (smart showing no problems). I've never had any issues with WD, which is why I keep buying them. I'm on my seventh drive now. They offer a three year warranty too. The only drive I've had give me issues was one of those 1TB Samsung Spinpoints. Fast as hell, but smart started showing warnings after a few months.

If you Google around you'll find the industry average failure rate for the greens is on par with pretty much everyone else. Of course, the harder you push the drive, the more likely it is to fail prematurely. I'm about to set up a RAID 5 with four of these guys. I went green because of power consumption, heat, and cost.

blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek

#716594 13-Nov-2012 18:41

CYaBro: Why go from a nice decent performing WD Black drive to a slow Green drive?
Why not just add another driver rather than replacing?
Would help with defrags etc. and backing up.

This is a valid point, but as I have a single seat installation I don't want to introduce another drive for acoustic and power reasons. I'd rather have it all on one drive, hence upgrading to a 3TB drive from my 2TB. In fact, having said that, I have contemplated putting a NAS somewhere else in the house and keeping the mechanical drive out of the system all together.

On that score, it is interesting to note that a lot of people seem to use these drives in a NAS or storage device. I can only think it is because of their price, and I'd also imagine that they perform ok as you'd get a performance increase from a single drive on the basis that its in a raid 0, 1 or 5 config.

Surprising how many have just outright failed too - wonder if this is over the odds?

bfginger

1268 posts

Uber Geek

#717305 14-Nov-2012 18:53

Friend has bought a few red ones and finds they dont keep getting chucked out of the raid, but I think thats the only benifit he sees, performance is still limited by his gutless computer doing the nas work.

The Reds have a TLER timeout of 7 seconds by default (can be changed or disabled). The Greens aren't intended as much more than backup hard drives so without a TLER timeout set they'll keep on trying to recover from an error indefinitely which may result in a RAID thinking the drive has died. Some WD Green models can have a TLER timeout set but others can't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLER

I have 4 WD 2TB Green drives in my home server running whs 2011. I've had 2 @ WD20EARS for ~2 years with no errors, and SMART is still showing them in pristine condition. I just bought 2 @ WD20EARX 2 months ago. At this point I'll gladly continue to buy WD Green drives. It should be noted that they aren't spec-ed to run in RAID arrays. They do a fine job serving video to my HTPC, though.

The WD Greens park their heads after 8s of inactivity which is bad form for RAID, servers or Linux systems. You can use the wdidle3 1.05 utility to set the heads to park after a longer period of time like 5 minutes. More recent WD Greens won't allow the head parking to be entirely disabled and will start malfunctioning if you try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqY5zlCXQmU

Why go from a nice decent performing WD Black drive to a slow Green drive?

Different drives perform better than others in different areas. A Black drive is going to be warm and loud. If we want a drive that is cool, low power and quiet then the Black isn't appropriate. The spec sheets are on the manufacturers' websites.

They offer a three year warranty too.

The Reds have 3 year warranties. I think the WD Greens are 2 years now.

If you're interested in buying a Green then you should probably buy a Red instead. They should be more reliable and vibrate less, have a longer warranty and have customisable TLER and head parking settings which are set correctly for RAID out of the box.

JimmyH

2886 posts

Uber Geek

#717338 14-Nov-2012 19:49

A NAS box is a good idea - basic 2 bay units go for not much more than $200 (not including disks) and have DLNA servers. This will let you add quite a bit of space fairly cheaply, network it so that media players etc can access files elsewhere in the house, and with low power consumption. Either two drives as JBOD, or have them mirror if you don't want to risk losing recorded material to a drive failure. It also means that you don't have to fiddle with changing an HTPC that is working well.

That's one of the things I am planning to do on my network - but with a 4 or 5 bay unit.

silver565

170 posts

Master Geek

#719314 19-Nov-2012 09:32

Just my 2 cents..

two of my WD greens have failed in the past year. They are 18 months old

martyyn

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#719531 19-Nov-2012 14:47

I know Im going to screw myself here, but Ive had two WD 1Tb Greens in my server, running 24x7 for longer than I can remember and they have been faultless.

As an aside, what do you all use to test your drives ? I'm wondering if there is something I don't know about and I should consider an upgrade before that statement comes back to haunt me ;)

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