Is it okay to get a WD Green drive for gaming?

[mohit9206]

So i am getting a new drive for my gaming PC to use as a primary drive and no i do not have money for SSD as price/capacity ratio of SSD is terrible(atleast where live).Now where i am buying from has only wd green drive in stock and not the blue drive.So my question is it okay to get a 1TB Green drive as a primary drive for OS,gaming, movies,etc? Will i face performance issues with the green drive or am i better off searching for a blue drive instead considering the blue drive will cost a little extra?
Where i live green 1tb drive is $70,1tb blue is $90,1tb black is $110 and 120gb SSD is $120.

 

[Anteaus]

I'd go with Black Series everytime if we are talking about a primary drive. Green drives are fine for secondary storage. My opinion, for what it's worth.

 

[mohit9206]

But black drive is quite a bit more expensive.What will happen if i buy Green drive for primary use? Will my pc run slow or will my games take long time to load or copy data from hdd to usb and vice versa?

 

[dma0991]

WD Green has power saving features turned on more aggressively than WD Blue or Black. It will not work properly as a primary drive but will do well as a secondary storage drive. Get WD Blue if you want to make it into a primary drive.

 

[CakeMonster]

I have SSD for OS and apps, but all my games are on a Green. No problems whatsoever. I've tried a few games on the SSD and I couldn't notice any difference. The greens have no audible noise when working so that might conceal any delay that you would have heard (and driven you nuts) otherwise, but as I said I didn't notice any difference. Just make sure to turn off sleep on hard drives s in windows power settings, because that will drive you nuts.

 

[Saylick]

WD Greens more more suited for high-capacity storage and low power consumption more than anything else. Whereas WD Blacks and WD Blues run at 7200 RPM, WD Greens hover around 5900 RPM if I recall correctly. Therefore, WD Blue is also the minimum that I would recommend for a primary drive.

WD Blacks have a longer warranty and a couple of other features that make them better than WD Blues, which explains the cost difference.

Like you, SSDs were too pricey for me when I first built my rig. Now that I've gotten a SSD as my primary drive, I made my WD Black my secondary storage drive. I have the settings set so that the Black will turn off after 10 minutes of idling, which helps with long term reliability, noise, and power consumption.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Spring for the blue. Avoid the black. It's additional price gets you nothing more than an extended warranty.

Partition the blue. Save money for SSD. Clone OS/apps partition to SSD. Keep games on Blue. Be very happy.

 

[mohit9206]

Spring for the blue. Avoid the black. It's additional price gets you nothing more than an extended warranty.

Partition the blue. Save money for SSD. Clone OS/apps partition to SSD. Keep games on Blue. Be very happy.

Ok so isnt the extended warranty worth the extra price? Also what about the other guy who said green drive is fine as long as i disable sleep in windows power settings? Looks like the blue drive is a good balance of price/performance. I guess i will go for the blue drive then.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Extended warranties aren't usually worth the additional cost in general, in this specific case, WD has computed exactly how much money offering the extended warranty costs them on black drive replacements. They then average that cost into the price of the blacks. There is no guarantee of improved reliability or anything like that.

The head parking/sleep isn't the only problem. You also have the fact that the drive is a 5400/5900 RPM compared to 7200 RPM of the blue.

 

[greenhawk]

Ok so isnt the extended warranty worth the extra price?

Also what about the other guy who said green drive is fine as long as i disable sleep in windows power settings?

Extened warranty is nice, but depends on where you are. Claiming WD warrenty for me is hard as I have to send to another country once it is outside of the shop warranty, which makes it a bit pricy. For me, I went black for the bit of extra performance. Warrenty is nice but not a must. Better to back up ypur important data than worry too much about a drive's warrenty. Though it is a nice feeling that the drive manufacture has more faith in their product to give it a longer warrenty period.

As to the power saving, it can help some, but the biggest issue with green drives is that they have a internal sleep timer which you can not change. If the drive goes to sleep on you when it is the OS drive, the computer freezes for a few seconds while the drive spins back up again. When the green is a storage drive, you do not have this freezing effect as the OS drive is still working and the program accessing the drive is the only thing that might pause.

 

[mohit9206]

I got myself WD Blue 1TB.Thanks for the help.

 

[amenx]

The WD Blue 1tb is faster than any black ever made. Black just has better warranty and is no longer viewed as a performance drive. That could change if they ever do single platter 1tb drives like the blue, but hasnt happened yet.

 

[hackerballs]

besides, you can use a green/blue/black/purple strips or any HDD for games. What would hold you back is how much RAM/CPU/GPU you have?

SSD is great for faster boots and transfer of internal data but not the "end of the world great"

 

[beginner99]

I have 3 green drives but I would never ever use them as my main system drive. hard drives are the limiting factor in a modern PC for average daily use. If you PC stutters, it's the hard drive, if windows updates take forever, it's the hard drive, if it takes 5 min after booting until your PC becomes usable, it's your hard drive.

Get an 64 GB SSD for the OS and a green drive for the games. 64 GB ssd are like what? $70 ? it's the cost of maybe 1 game (assuming you don't pirate) but it will give you a way, way better PC experience for the whole life of the PC. It is worth it.

 

[Vinwiesel]

If you can't get by with a small SSD, I would go with the blue drive as a primary. I used a green drive as the primary/only drive in a HTPC. It was slow to boot as expected, and sluggish to launch programs, but it was perfectly functional. It made no difference for watching videos, or playing well optimized games. For a poorly optimized game with lots of seeking, a green drive will be horrendous and laggy. But honestly, not much worse than a 7200rpm drive with a poorly optimized game.

That time after windows boots and is loading things in the background will take twice as long with a green drive. So will the time to launch a program. For large file transfers with minimal seeking, there is no real-world difference between green and blue. In fact, the 1tb green drive I used was a better all around performer than the 7ish year old 250gb 7200rpm drive it replaced. I still replaced it with a cheap small SSD as soon as I had the chance though. Once you've gotten used to a computer with SSD, they seem painfully sluggish without one.

 

[BFG10K]

Here are some game load tests I ran on a few drives:

There's a 1TB/platter Green drive used in the tests and as you can see, it competes quite well with the 7200RPM drives. Of course the 10K RPM Raptor is a cut above them all, so it's definitely worthwhile if you want extra performance but can't justify a 1TB SSD.

 

[Blue_Max]

I was going to say I've used Green drives as a single partition for OS & games - it never felt "painful" at any time. It was still noticeably better than the older 200GB 7200 drive I was using before it!

 

[Modular]

I was going to say I've used Green drives as a single partition for OS & games - it never felt "painful" at any time. It was still noticeably better than the older 200GB 7200 drive I was using before it!

My thinking exactly. Most of the time you're upgrading your drives, it's because the ones you have are old and full. Any newer drive is likely to result in a performance boost.

That being said, damn SSD's are amazing as boot drives!

 

[bononos]

People just shouldn't be scared off just because they happen to have the green label, WD greens aren't bad at all, if its a very current model.

The older greens had head parking every 8s which caused the load/unload cycle count to exceed the specs (300k) within several months. Some said the specs weren't up to date and drives could handle much more than that but because of higher failure rates, it just seemed to make sense. The newer greens are set to park at 30s and the wdidle utility can set it to 300s max.
I've set mine higher after the 200k load/unload count after 2yrs.