How worse are WD Greens and do I need to worry about the parking problem?

[r19]

So a few weeks ago I had planned to get a 1TB hard drive from the same tech shops commercial zone I usually buy from after seeing WD Blue 1TB selling for cheap. I hadn't cared to do research on Black and Green as I though they'd be unnecessary. So yesterday I went and unfortunately there was no Blue in any shop and the shopkeepers were saying that it was discontinued and replace by 7200rpm Greens (going for same price as I had planned to buy a Blue). One shop had Caviar Blue but it was 20% more than listed Blue price and I didn't feel like paying much for it as I'd been waiting for HDD prices to get cheaper and it was an older model. I didn't bring my smartphone and wasn't aware of Green's parking and reliability problems but recalled 4-5 stars reviews in Newegg,Amazon etc. This model is WD10ezrx.

I saw the drive had a 7200rpm mark in it and decided to go with it. Well when I returned home there wasn't that mark on the drive(well apparently that particular shopkeeper didn't know about it), nor did I find anything about WD Green 7200rpm online. The cover was already little opened and you can't return bought stuff here. Now I'm worried sick about this purchase-
*I have an old(2009,likely 5400rpm) drive as boot/primary storage. Will the WD Green be fine for it? Will the application loading times etc be too slow? Btw I'm mostly using Linux and most heavy is only stuff like, vlc,kdevelop,browsers,file managers. However I do notice lags on current disks opening browsers or sometimes clicking start menu.
*Will the Green be fine for day to day usage like lagless opening of thumbnails and images etc.
*Do I need to disable the 8 sec parking on this drive?
*Should I consider selling the WD Green for a loss and get the Caviar Blue or wait for Blue?

I haven't used the drive till now as I haven't bought the Sata connector and Molex to Sata convertor (yes the rest of the computers from 6 years ago..)

 

[bigboxes]

I would never trust a Western Digital Green drive with any data that I value. I bought two of them and certain things are just unacceptable.

 

[BlueWeasel]

WD Green's running at 7200 RPM? I doubt it, as most run at 5400 or 5900 RPM. Because of this, I wouldn't use it as a boot/OS drive. They are fine for general file storage.

I guess I've been lucky with them, as I've had several 1TB and 2GB green drives over the years with no issues. Got 2x2TB of them in my NAS right now.

 

[Charlie98]

I have a 500GB Green in my security camera box, it has something like 20K hours of 24/7 writing on it. Despite my general dislike of 'green' drives, it's been running like a champ and I have no complaints other than it's a bit noisy (I can hear it writing in the closet when I'm laying in bed.) Having said that, it doesn't have any opportunity to head park because it's constantly writing.

You have it, I would just use it. Disabling the head parking would help response time in use, but you are not going to get snappy response like you would with a 7200RPM drive or, certainly, an SSD, but I would almost think a lagging response time is more from the 6-year old computer rather than a green drive. If after using it you decide it just isn't for you, wipe it and sell it.

 

[r19]

I do feel very stupid now.. I guess you get used to buying stuff after reading some reviews of it and stop thinking of dangers. Should have been more patient.

As for rest of my computer, there is a 2.3ghz core 2 duo and 2GB RAM(which I don't stress it enough to get filled as I don't do much stressful work now). Never seen the CPU more than 50-60% too.

If after using it you decide it just isn't for you, wipe it and sell it. If after using it you decide it just isn't for you, wipe it and sell it.

The problem with that is it can reduce the value.. I'll list it at a site and see how much it can go for. I tested the HDD by replacing my old one and it got listed so at least its not DOA. [/quote]

I bought two of them and certain things are just unacceptable.

Is this about an issue with a unit or Greens in general?




Also is there any difference between a newer WD Blue and Caviar Blue except Cache? would it impact performance much?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Also is there any difference between a newer WD Blue and Caviar Blue except Cache? would it impact performance much?

They are essentially the same - "WD Caviar Blue". If one has more cache memory, then I would probably get that one, because that would indicate that it's newer.

Edit: Btw, I've never heard of a 7200RPM Green drive either. Could be a fake.

 

[wildwestgoh]

The seller probably does not know or just lie to make you buy them.
Anyway, Green (Eco) drive is not meant for OS/boot drive, the idle park issue is one of the main attributes of power saving, your OS will feel slower (5,400rpm) and may sometimes even feel sluggish and "hang" for couple of seconds due to its idle park.
There's a software that can disable the power management in that drive but that void the warranty.

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there.

WD Green drives are not 7200 RPM, but Intellipower instead which is a balance between spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms that deliver both power savings and solid performance. That means if your application requires mostly sequential read/writes, then the drive will perform comparable to a 7,200 RPM drive, and if your application performs mostly random mode operations, then the performance may drop by about 10% because of the latency time.

Also, WD Green is designed for secondary storage purposes, so it will fit very good for mass storing of music, pics, movies, etc. It's energy efficient and its main benefit is that the drive save power and wear by spinning down when it can, which means they're basically best for things like backup drives which are only in use periodically. The spin down is why I wouldn't recommend it as a boot drive, but nonetheless you can change to wait longer before positioning the heads by using this firmware and it will not void your warranty:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=enhPSI

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have!

Cheers!

 

[BFG10K]

The spin down is why I wouldn't recommend it as a boot drive, but nonetheless you can change to wait longer before positioning the heads by using this firmware and it will not void your warranty:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=enhPSI

Are you a WD employee? I ask because your handle implies you are, but you don't have a disclaimer in your signature or post.

If you are, the page you linked to clearly states:

This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.

CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above.

His drive (WD10EZRX) isn't listed there. Are you saying WD officially endorses this utility on unlisted Greens and will honor warranties if something is bricked?

 

[Valantar]

I have two 2TB Greens that have been in pretty active use for a few years now, and they're doing just fine. I have at one point run one of them as a boot drive, which is something I would never, ever do again. The drives just aren't suited for that kind of work, and your system would be painfully slow (at least mine was). Greens are storage and backup drives, not boot drives.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

*Will the Green be fine for day to day usage like lagless opening of thumbnails and images etc.
*Do I need to disable the 8 sec parking on this drive?
*Should I consider selling the WD Green for a loss and get the Caviar Blue or wait for Blue?

I bought a WD Green 3 TB drive a year ago.

I've been tracking the "load/unload cycle" count since I bought it.

It's been running between 15 and 20 cycles per day--maybe 6000 per year.

I've never run the WD utility designed to change the head parking value. My drive is set to the default.

Some earlier WD drives would reach 100,000 or more cycles within weeks, sometimes after having very low cycle counts for a long time and then suddenly going berserk.

I think they are rated for several hundred thousand cycle counts, so I don't have any issues and see no need to run that WD utility.

This WD Green 3.0 is about 10% faster than my primary data drive, a 7200 rpm Samsung 103SJ--which was among the fastest 7200 rpm HDDs when I bought it in 2011.

Caviar Blue?? Don't think I've ever heard the term. For a data drive, the only shortcoming I see for the Blue series is the size limit of 1 TB. They have a shorter warranty, but I'd never RMA a data drive anyway.

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Are you a WD employee? I ask because your handle implies you are, but you don't have a disclaimer in your signature or post.

If you are, the page you linked to clearly states:


His drive (WD10EZRX) isn't listed there. Are you saying WD officially endorses this utility on unlisted Greens and will honor warranties if something is bricked?

Yes, I'm a WD rep, but I can't get an access to my signature since I need to have 25 posts, and I forgot to put it in my post as well.

As for firmware, this tool works on the listed models and it may work on similar models as well. If this model doesn’t support the WDIDLE tool then most probably nothing would happen with the HDD (e.g. its behavior won’t change in anyway). Here's an article from our KB concerning this matter:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5357

 

[CiPHER]

I would never trust a Western Digital Green drive with any data that I value. I bought two of them and certain things are just unacceptable.

Things such as? Your post does not make any sense without specifying what issue you had.

Most likely, you hit a problem with bad sectors. But then it is your software that is faulty; it was not designed to handle unreadable sectors - which in fact IS unacceptable in this era since consumer harddrives do 10^-14 uBER and that means bad sectors are common - much more common than in the past. But blame your old operating system and old filesystem - do not blame modern hardware.

Anyway, Green (Eco) drive is not meant for OS/boot drive [..] your OS will feel slower (5,400rpm) and may sometimes even feel sluggish and "hang" for couple of seconds due to its idle park.

5400rpm is only 33% slower with IOps than 7200rpm while consuming 50% less power. But even 15.000rpm is very slow as system drive. You want an SSD, since this is the equivalent to the performance of 100 to 1000 harddrives when concerning random I/O performance. So 33% means nothing when considering up to 100000% (one hundred thousand percent) performance increase.

The headparking should not delay I/O more than 10 - 20 milliseconds, certainly not seconds that is crazy. Then the harddrive would never be able to do much I/O since by default it is set to park after 1 to 5 seconds.

There's a software that can disable the power management in that drive but that void the warranty.

You can set APM to 254 which will disable headparking, you can use the manufacturer utility WDIDLE3.EXE and you can buy newer Green models which already have the timer reduced significantly. Headparking is no big deal anymore. It never was, really. Unless people used the disk 24/7 and didn't change the timer.

Hi there.

WD Green drives are not 7200 RPM, but Intellipower instead which is a balance between spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms that deliver both power savings and solid performance.

Sorry, but that is.. basically just crap.

IntelliPower is nothing more than a marketing term used to obfuscate the fact that this is a 5400rpm-class drive with a static rpm that never changes during operation. The exact rpm may vary per badge, that is what IntelliPower means. But that is true for mostly any harddrive.

The true story is that consumers think 5400rpm is slow and are used to seeing high numbers. If they had a 7200rpm HDD in the past, they may not want to buy 5400rpm thinking it would be slow. Not knowing anything about platter capacity and its effect on sequential performance - meaning a 5400rpm drive can even beat a 15.000rpm drive because it has higher data density which translates to higher sequential speeds.

 

[sxr7171]

7200 does reduce latency though and would be better for an OS or boot drive. Otherwise today's 5400 RPM drives will read sequential data faster than yesterday's 7200 RPM drives.