Green Drives Suck

[C1]

Beginning to get a bit annoyed at the green drive concept. Most green drives and enclosures do not provide modifiable control over time to spin down. This is experienced as problematic for performance.

More jobs (more often than I care to be involved with) are constantly waiting on HDD access because of greeness.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

What drives you talking about and did you use it in raid single drive etc etc

 

[f4phantom2500]

here's the hd tune results for my caviar green (wd6400aacs) raid 0 array when the drives were new with a fresh win 7 64 ultimate install:

http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hpho..._564193425135_44409147_32824814_4649726_n.jpg

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/817640

for some perspective, my results are better than the guy with 4x36 gb raptors in raid 0 in max, average, and burst rate, slightly better max than the guy with 2x150gb velociraptors, a little worse average, but higher burst. i remember seeing results of 2x500gb caviar blues in raid 0 that just fell short of my array.

basically, from what i've experienced, caviar greens aren't the slow-ass drives that people like to think they are. i'm really curious to hear more specifics about the OPs situation because he must have some bad drives or be doing a very specific task or something.

op if you need near-instantaneous response get an ssd, seriously.

 

[Castiel]

here's the hd tune results for my caviar green (wd6400aacs) raid 0 array when the drives were new with a fresh win 7 64 ultimate install:

http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hpho..._564193425135_44409147_32824814_4649726_n.jpg

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/817640

for some perspective, my results are better than the guy with 4x36 gb raptors in raid 0 in max, average, and burst rate, slightly better max than the guy with 2x150gb velociraptors, a little worse average, but higher burst. i remember seeing results of 2x500gb caviar blues in raid 0 that just fell short of my array.

basically, from what i've experienced, caviar greens aren't the slow-ass drives that people like to think they are. i'm really curious to hear more specifics about the OPs situation because he must have some bad drives or be doing a very specific task or something.

op if you need near-instantaneous response get an ssd, seriously.

Your comparing greens to drives 4 years ago?

 

[f4phantom2500]

Your comparing greens to drives 4 years ago?

the 500gb caviar blues should be as current as 640gb caviar greens, but they're solid mainstream 7200 rpm drives, not "slow" green drives...also do you not remember how "insanely fast" the raptors were (supposedly)? i'm not saying the greens are amazing, i just think they're a lot more solid than the hype would have you believe, just as the raptors weren't as "insane" as the hype would have you believe. furthermore, my drives aren't even the best greens available. nor were they when i bought them in 2009.

 

[beginner99]

I think he is referring to the head parking thing. One it is fully idle and head are parked, it can be a bit annoying because it takes some time till the drive responds (I would say 2-4 sec).

it does not bother me much because I only have media files on one of them and the other with applications/games on it is mostly active (downloads).
However I woudl agree that green drives suck as OS drive.

 

[f4phantom2500]

I think he is referring to the head parking thing. One it is fully idle and head are parked, it can be a bit annoying because it takes some time till the drive responds (I would say 2-4 sec).

it does not bother me much because I only have media files on one of them and the other with applications/games on it is mostly active (downloads).
However I woudl agree that green drives suck as OS drive.

oic. never bothered me. idk if the fact that im running raid 0 would affect that, or maybe my expectations are just low.

 

[frostedflakes]

Waiting for the heads to unpark shouldn't take long, what he's probably talking about is waiting for the drive to spin up, which takes a couple seconds and can be really annoying.

In Windows 7 at least you should be able to disable this in power management. Go to the advanced power settings and there should be a timer for how long it takes to turn off the HDD. Set it to 0 (never).

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

hahaha lol

Let me tell you something. WD CAVIAR disks will suck in a raid array. Why? Why you think they got a Raid series? The caviar and other disks are poor performers in raid. The RE disks are the disks of WD to use in the raid array.

 

[alaricljs]

The RE disks have no change in active performance in comparison to the non-RE drives of the same RPM and data size. The RE disks have some tiny modifications of the firmware to make them less likely to drop out of a RAID array at the drop of a hat. They don't park their heads every 8 seconds and they likely have no default timeout for spin-down.

 

[C1]

Drives which seem to turn off on their own (in my case) are (admittedly) much older WDs (IDE). When they turn off/on you can hear them click then spin up/down.

But, the new 2TB external by Hitachi is also green and has an annoying 9 minute timeout. That heavy five platter behemoth spindle takes at least a good 5-7 seconds to ready, but changing out the enclosure should solve this.

Frankly, this timeout should be made modifiable by the manufacturer as it can be really interfering depending on the task/job (seems Im always waiting to access or save data).

 

[f4phantom2500]

hahaha lol

Let me tell you something. WD CAVIAR disks will suck in a raid array. Why? Why you think they got a Raid series? The caviar and other disks are poor performers in raid. The RE disks are the disks of WD to use in the raid array.

unless you have some data that shows RE disks performing significantly better than their caviar equivalents, i frankly don't believe you. then again, i never really read into it too much.

 

[Makaveli]

Beginning to get a bit annoyed at the green drive concept. Most green drives and enclosures do not provide modifiable control over time to spin down. This is experienced as problematic for performance.

More jobs (more often than I care to be involved with) are constantly waiting on HDD access because of greeness.

I have a 2TD 64mb Green drive and its runs great, however its in a ESATA enclosure and used as a backup drive.

 

[beginner99]

hahaha lol

Let me tell you something. WD CAVIAR disks will suck in a raid array. Why? Why you think they got a Raid series? The caviar and other disks are poor performers in raid. The RE disks are the disks of WD to use in the raid array.

The RE disk have a feature called TLER which helps prevent disks getting dropped from an array in case of few bad sectors while trying to recover. They thing is most software raid especially in out of the box NAS is much more tolerant and actually ignores this feature which basically make RE drives useless for a normal consumer.

I'm not sure about intel chipset raid.

 

[Blain]

Any reasearch at all would have indicated that green drives aren't what you want, if you're looking for performance.

 

[killster1]

I AGREE GREEN DRIVES SUCK. you have to raid them to even make them into a decent drive? Because i recently used a 1tb (green) to install and extract games and it took FOREVER. buddy has almost same setup as my 3 year old except my 3 year olds smokes his and only has 640gb blue compared to 1tb green (ears) model.. very disgusted

how ever i used a green 750gb that i got from woot.com for dirt cheap years ago and it was fine for storage drive seemed like 70mb/s

 

[Tsavo]

Green drives are awesome. My Samsung F2 only runs when I ask it to, and it's perfectly silent when it does run. It's pokier than cold molasses, but I didn't get it for speed.

Use them for their intended role, and you'll be happy with them.

 

[Emulex]

you just start up a job and keep the buffer filled and the green drive never enters a sleep cycle? wtf that is really easy to do. esp with D2D2D backups.

annoying feature? yes; avoidable? Definitely. my raid controller is set to 3 second idle sweep drives. it scavenges all drives when idle looking for tasty bad sectors.

 

[Voo]

The only drives I know of that do head parking in the FW and ignore the OS settings are several WD green drives, which arguably can be a problem and is just idiotic.

But if we ignore those outliers, the concept works perfectly fine for me - and why shouldn't it? For backups or storing movies the low RPM are completely uninteresting.
If you've got problems with green drives you either got the wrong ones (see above) or use it for the wrong scenarios..

 

[Old Hippie]

Any reasearch at all would have indicated that green drives aren't what you want, if you're looking for performance.

There ya have it.

I'm thinking some need to research before they purchase.

 

[notposting]

Considering my WHS stays up 24/7 I am quite happy with my Green drives in it, work perfectly fine for large file transfers and multiple HD and DVD playback streams over Gb network. Use them for their intended purpose and they are great. Just like anything else...do you buy Atom processors and complain they are bad at gaming? Use Intel graphics and complain they don't run games well?

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Hm I have a 640 double platter black and a 1TB Green. I rarely even access my green and mostly use it to store crap like movies and music. It takes like 4 seconds to load up for the few times I click it in a month to look at the files. My black is pretty fast for everything else until I decide on an SSD for my desktop.

 

[JimmiG]

Well I for one am glad that 5400RPM drivers are making a return. Even an external USB2.0 drive I bought a few years ago was 7200 RPM, which makes absolutely no sense considering the limitations of the USB interface.

I don't need 150MB/s transfer rates and super-low access times to listen to an MP3 at 192Kb/s. For storing rarely accessed files like music, movies, backup archives etc., a short spin-down time and low power operation are more important than access time or transfer rate.

 

[Vinwiesel]

They're great drives when used for their intended purpose. Cheap, quiet, and tons of storage. Anyone that needs a faster drive can buy a faster drive.

 

[hal2kilo]

Beginning to get a bit annoyed at the green drive concept. Most green drives and enclosures do not provide modifiable control over time to spin down. This is experienced as problematic for performance.

More jobs (more often than I care to be involved with) are constantly waiting on HDD access because of greeness.

Seems like these things should only be used for archive.