Edit: I bought the WD 1TB blue! Impressions inside.

[TurtleCrusher]

Edit: I'm copying the 640gb black over to the new 1TB blue to do a fresh windows install on the black. It's copying files over at 65MB per second. Is that slow? For the first 10 seconds it was around 120MB. Now its sustained at 55MB.

First impression besides the write speed, it's a cold HDD. I have a big Antec P180 with one corner and a vent just for my two HDD's. No fan present right there. The 1TB blue is at a chilly 35C during intense writing after 20 mins. The 640GB black is near the case (blue is in the middle) and the black is at 39C. These seem to be cool running drives. The maxtor IDE that i've had forever ran at about 45-50C even with a fan on it, but it's still running and it benches more consistently than my other HDDs ever have.

So I just had two HDD die in the span of a week. Both Seagates. One was a 1TB 7200.12 and my old trusty 200GB sata 1.5 just died. I'm only running a single WD 640gb black AALS. I have 500GB of 600GB used. I need another HDD that's at least 500GB. Mostly as a storage drive or maybe an alternate application drive to speed things up even more.

Reliability first, space in a close second, and speed is a distant third.

Which of these?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136534 WD 1TB Cav blue 32mb $57

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136490 WD 1TB Cav green 64mb $65

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136517 WD 800GB 64mb Cav green $60

Or anything else? Price is a factor here. I don't mean to be pro WD, I just haven't had one die on me. The 1TB blue looks great (as fast as my 640 black?) but I need more opinions.

 

[corkyg]

Of the three - go Blue!

 

[tweakboy]

Go blue it's going to be the fastest one and probably same audible noise as a Green,,

Good price 60 bucks for 1TB not bad. Its a faster drive then the 64mb cache one because cache doesnt mean much and youll never see a difference if you have 32MB or 64MB . Its just used for its internal caching and how it speaks with RAM etc. No real world difference. so get the Blue that is the fastest hd out of your 3 choices. A blue 32MB is faster then a Green 64MB. Kapeesh.. hehe 🙂

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Go blue it's going to be the fastest one and probably same audible noise as a Green,,

Good price 60 bucks for 1TB not bad. Its a faster drive then the 64mb cache one because cache doesnt mean much and youll never see a difference if you have 32MB or 64MB . Its just used for its internal caching and how it speaks with RAM etc. No real world difference. so get the Blue that is the fastest hd out of your 3 choices. A blue 32MB is faster then a Green 64MB. Kapeesh.. hehe 🙂

Solid post, Tweakboy 😀

 

[Emulex]

blue is what they put in oem (hp). solid. not the fastest - black is.

pick black if you can, trust me on that. but blue is okay.

green - unless you are really trying to solve a heat issue - more problems than necessary

 

[TurtleCrusher]

blue is what they put in oem (hp). solid. not the fastest - black is.

pick black if you can, trust me on that. but blue is okay.

green - unless you are really trying to solve a heat issue - more problems than necessary

Well, I already have a 640GB black, which is one of the fastest mechanical HDD's out there (at least when I bought it) and it is my OS drive, so speed doesn't matter too much. Reliability and space does.

 

[jez006]

Just to throw it out there...I have never had a samsung hard drive die on me. Just replaced 2 that were 3 and 4 years old. Not a single problem. Maybe I'm lucky though 😛

 

[Blain]

If reliability is your most critical consideration, why would you not opt for a black edition?

Green warranty = 3 years
Blue warranty = 3 years
Black warranty = 5 years

Granted warranty doesn't directly translate into reliability. But it does indicate how the drives are treated by the manufacturer.

 

[tweakboy]

Thank you Scholzpdx

That one is just for you. I felt good when I was writing it baby! You learn a lot on these sites and Anand forums.

 

[tweakboy]

Heads up blain for the warranty information.

Here is my 2 cents on that.

WDC drives are top notch when it comes to not braking down. However you must take care of a drive if you don't want to hear that click click sound and its dead. Heat for example. Did you know hard drives are happy to be 30c ish. Not 40ish or 50ish. This is why I got the iCage. I have a 120GB WDC SATA I on it from 2004. Its still going strong and it has surprassed 40,000 thousand hours. This screenshot is a week old the drive it still collecting hours everything ok.

Also the most reliable drive back in the day was Seagates. NOT ANYMORE! Because the second worst drive makers before IBM quit the business of drive making is Maxtor. Since Maxtor and Seagate hopped in bed with each other its Maxtors factories that produce Seagate and Maxtor drives. Soon the name change will take place where everything is called Maxtor no more Seagate. I also had a 80GB Seagate "before merger obviously" still working perfect with 36,000 hours and I bet it would still be going but I took it out of the cage. With a Seagate of today or Maxtor same thing, It could be 6 months or 1 year and your losing sectors already. Their external drives are especially horrible with no on off button and what not.

The blue is the fastest and dont worry about the warranty keep the drive taken care of and it will go like mine passed 40k hours of operation without single issue. Tigthen those screws good. soo no vibration. Also make sure your drive is not sitting at 40c or higher at idle with hdtune app. Drives need fans too you know...especially if your the type where you buy something and you expect to service you for years and years. Thank you.. gg and gb

 

[FishAk]

Concerning heat, reliability, black and blue, I think sub.mesa's excellent comment is worth repeating:

Reliability is a topic of hot debate.

I can only state my own understanding and perspectives; you would have to judge them yourself according to your own experience and analysis.

But the biggest problem with HDDs is their mechanical nature; it tends to break. Mechanical motion causes wear and unpredictable lifetime. The more mechanical components, the more components you have that can break. The more components the higher the power consumption and thus more heat. That is why single platter 7200rpm disks have quite acceptable heat generation; but multi-platter 7200rpm disks are rather hot.

Temperature is also often misunderstood. It is not very bad for a HDD to be continuously at a high temperature like 48 degrees. What i believe is particularly devasting to a mechanical drive is temperature changes that would cause the metal in the HDD to contract and expand. Even worse, if you put a fan on one side you could create an imbalance in temperature; one side would be cooler than the other. That means that metal does not expand uniformly. It is totally unclear what this does with drive reliability, but i believe many disks die due ultimately due to these temperature changes.

That's why i think 5400rpm drives have an underrated advantage; they do not require cooling and as such will heat up very uniformly and calmly. Due to their lower power consumption only minimal natural airflow is needed for heat dissipation. This may ultimately also increase reliability.

Simply said, the better environment you expose your disks to, the less chance a mechanical failure fails the drive. But some failures cannot be prevented even with good care, and as such HDDs are too unreliable for non-redundant data storage. As such, the little differences between HDD vendors are not very relevant i think. More relevant is how good the user's backup plan is; that really determines the 'reliability of your files' if you will.

As always, your experience may vary.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Well, I just bought the blue and another Sata cable for $62 shipped.

Which should I keep as my OS drive? The 1TB Blue or my 640gb black? I'm thinking of keeping one as my OS drive and splitting programs throughout both to keep boot time fast. I'll do an rma on my Seagate and keep it as a backup storage drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Heads up blain for the warranty information.

Here is my 2 cents on that.

WDC drives are top notch when it comes to not braking down. However you must take care of a drive if you don't want to hear that click click sound and its dead. Heat for example. Did you know hard drives are happy to be 30c ish. Not 40ish or 50ish. This is why I got the iCage. I have a 120GB WDC SATA I on it from 2004. Its still going strong and it has surprassed 40,000 thousand hours. This screenshot is a week old the drive it still collecting hours everything ok.

I agree! I try to keep my HD temps between 30 and 40C. Anything hotter is too hot.

One time, when I had my IBM 30GB 75GXP in a removal mobile rack, it overheated, and started to lose sectors once it hit 55C. That's when I learned to keep my drives cool.

Haven't had a failure in recent memory, although I try not to run my drives until they did. I generally sell off, or build for friends with my older drives. WD 40/80GB "BB" drives are still going strong. Actually, any WD
IDE drive between 40-250GB has been rock-solid for me.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Updated OP.

 

[fuzzymath10]

The slow speed could just depend on where you're copying to and from. Maybe it slowed down because the data on your Black was near the inside, or maybe the Blue was being written to the inner tracks.

For a single giant copy, my Seagate 7200.11 fluctuated between 50 and 90MB/sec and I'm ok with that. Also if you're copying smaller files, the rate will decrease.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Turns out it was very MANY small files. I copied my steam folder and for the first few minutes it was about 200KB per second, but almost a thousand files were moving per second. Speeds seem good.