WD green drives were causing my PC to BSOD...

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surfisup1000

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#166352 10-Mar-2015 17:08

I was getting fairly regular BSODS on windows 7 and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was the controller drivers and hunted for the latest but no luck.

After more research, it seems that sata controller cards/ external docks / and the WD drive 'intelli' features cause the drive to stop responding and bsod the system or just drop out.

I'll never again buy WD green drives with 'intellipark' 'intellipower' etc .

I just swapped the drives with seagates and all works just fine now--the WD drives are now for backup only. I guess it was my fault for being cheap :)

Dynamic

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#1254802 10-Mar-2015 17:18

You can turn off things like intellipark IIRC.

I remember threads about these drives potentially failing prematurely because the heads were parking on and off all day and wearing out within a year. Also NAS devices freak out when the heards were parked and the drive took a wee bit too long to respond to data requests so the drives were being reported as failed and dropped from RAID arrays in home NAS devices. The solution was to hook the drive to a SATA port in a PC and use a utility to turn off the intellipoark, or at lease change the time before parking to a more reasonable number of seconds.

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tommywd

15 posts

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#1273651 30-Mar-2015 19:00

Hi there surfisup1000,

Most people get confused with the WD Green drive. The WD Green drive are design and are made used solely for storage purpose only. The WD Green drives are optimized for low power usage and as a result they're noticeably poorer performers. In particular, they spin down after several seconds of inactivity so the first access to them after an idle period can take a few seconds.

If you are looking for daily usage or high performance computing I would not recommend getting the WD Green drive.

Cheers!!

Dynamic

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#1273695 30-Mar-2015 19:48

Quote from the Western Digital web site (on this page)

Capacity storage Large capacity offerings of up to 6 TBs help expand customer capabilities and application usage of WD Green including primary installations in desktop PCs, as secondary storage in external cases or as reliable backup storage.

Tommy, this leads me to believe that you are confused, or the WD marketing department is confused.

Disclaimer: I run a small an IT company and use and sell WD drives, and WD is our preferred brand. But we never sell WD Green as the primary drive in any device.

“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” Douglas Adams

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andrewNZ

2487 posts

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#1273705 30-Mar-2015 19:59

Use WDIDLE3. Set the park time to 5 minutes.