black drives vs green drives for games

[OVerLoRDI]

Originally Posted by birthdaymonkey

You can disable the head parking with the officially provided wdidle utility.

I have Green drives for storage on all my machines and haven't had any issues. I use them for primary storage and my Samsung F4s (pre-flood) for backup because the Greens are quieter.

Good to know. With that utility, I might consider purchasing green drives again.

[Anteaus]

Just wanted to throw this out there. The head parking problem that plagued Green drives in 2010 was fixed with firmware ages ago. The drives you buy today don't have those issues and you shouldn't consider that a reason not to buy one. It's funny that people still keep bringing a problem that was fixed over 18 months ago as if they had a drive fail from it yesterday. There are reasons why Black Series drives are superior to Green Series drives, but reliability due to those earlier problems isn't one of them. My system currently has 2 black series drives (1TB, 500MB) and 2 3TB green drives and I haven't had trouble with any of them. If I have one gripe about the Green drives is that they are noticeably slower than Black drives, but that's what you get when you buy a drive that's marketed as energy efficient.

My personal opinion is that green drives are fine but underperform if your looking for a system drive. For all other uses they are solid drives. Black Series drives are just awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing how the Red drives do.

[bononos]

Originally Posted by Nvidiaguy07

well either way, im more concerned about the drive not failing than anything right now. And the fact that WD hasa 2 year warranty on green drives, and a 5 year on blacks makes me just want to pay up and get black.

What are the actual chances of these drives failing (green), as long as i run some tests right when i get it? And if thats the case, is just getting 2 green and setting them up in raid a better option? So it would be like ~300 dollars for 2 3TB green drives vs like 180 for the WD black 2tb.

I think the recent WD green models (earx or later) are good. Thats not to say all the older models are bad but there is one (too tired to look it up) which seems to have higher failures. You could try looking up storage review to see if they have some data, probably still too early to make conclusions but still useful.

Hardware.fr since 2009 have return rates data which is not the same as long term reliability data but could be indicative of problems later on. I doubt WD greens are inherently worse(eg contain inferior components which fail sooner) when it comes to long term reliability, the head parking thing is an issue for linux systems or RAID but IIRC not a problem for windows.

This is a summary taking data from the hardware.fr site on thw last year. You could draw a trend that more platters=more problems(generally) which seems to make sense. An excerpt from the most recent report -

Six discs exceed 5% failure rate:

- 9.70% 3 TB Seagate Barracuda XT
- 8.94% Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 1.5 TB
- 7.53% 2 TB Seagate Barracuda XT
- 7.30% 2 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000
- 5.78% Western Digital RE4-GP 2 TB
- 5.33% Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB

Hitachi is not the only one with high failure rates if you look precisely the models, and we note particularly the bad behavior of Barracuda XT. What about the 2 TB disks in their entirety?

- 7.53% Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6Gb / s
- 5.78% Western Digital RE4-GP 2 TB
- 4.53% Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB
- 3.18% Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB
- 3.07% Western Digital AV-GP 2 TB
- 2.55% Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB
- 2.31% Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB WD20EARX
- 2.15% Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB WD20EARS
- 1.80% Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F4 2TB

Again returns data is not the same as long term reliability testing but it does seem to mesh with what people are seeing in the field.

[murphyc]

I mentioned this in another thread. I have a WDC D7500BPKT-00PK4T0 which is a Scorpio Black, mobile disk inside a laptop. The spec minimum load cycle count is 600,000. The disk is slightly less than 16 months old and SMART reports over 721,000 load/cycle counts. It clicks once every 5 seconds.

So it's not just the greens, and isn't an old behavior. I understand the context thus far as been desktop disks, not mobile disks.

[BFG10K]

I’d go with the Black – better warranty and better performance for game load times.

[beginner99]

I have my steam folder on a WD Green 2 TB. I assume loading games is faster from a black drive. If that matters to you only you can tell. I mean i mostly still play BC2 on 1000 ticket servers so i load a level like once every 30 mins.

Head parking is a non-issue for gaming. Yes, there can be a lag when the drives spins up but my game drive also contains the torrent target folder so it actually never spins down.

Anyway, blacks sure are faster but greens are perfectly fine too. If you have the money and spending it doesn't bother you much, get the black.

[birthdaymonkey]

Originally Posted by murphyc

I mentioned this in another thread. I have a WDC D7500BPKT-00PK4T0 which is a Scorpio Black, mobile disk inside a laptop. The spec minimum load cycle count is 600,000. The disk is slightly less than 16 months old and SMART reports over 721,000 load/cycle counts. It clicks once every 5 seconds.

So it's not just the greens, and isn't an old behavior. I understand the context thus far as been desktop disks, not mobile disks.

My Green drive was clicking constantly and reported tens of thousands of load/cycle counts in the first little while that I owned it. Since I've used the wdidle utility on my drives, the load/unload SMART value has barely budged and the drives are whisper quiet. It's really not hard to fix... just requires a DOS boot disk and away you go.

http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...id=609&sid=113

[bigystyle84]

I'm running games currently off a WD Green 2TB drive. No issues here.

[thelastjuju]

Originally Posted by birthdaymonkey

I have Green drives for storage on all my machines and haven't had any issues. I use them for primary storage and my Samsung F4s (pre-flood) for backup because the Greens are quieter.

This means nothing unless you tell us if you are UNDER 2 years usage, or OVER 2 years of usage?

[birthdaymonkey]

Originally Posted by thelastjuju

This means nothing unless you tell us if you are UNDER 2 years usage, or OVER 2 years of usage?

One over two years, two under two years.

[ShadowVVL]

I have been running a wd 1 tb green since september 2008 runs fine.I never knew about wdidle utility.