Please set the record straight. Does WD green drives have head parking ?

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Mfusick

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Dec 20, 2010
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NoTouch Ramp Load technology.
The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
Click to expand...

Does that mean that the WD Green drives do or do not park the head after 8 seconds causing higher number of on/off cycles in 27/7 NAS or Server operations?

I've seen conflicting information and I am confused.

Does or does not WD green have head parking ?

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=780
 
Cerb

Cerb

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Aug 26, 2000
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Mfusick said:
Does that mean that the WD Green drives do or do not park the head after 8 seconds causing higher number of on/off cycles in 27/7 NAS or Server operations?
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Neither.

All the quoted gibberish means is that WD has marketing weenies that are good at convincing people they are worth employing.

If a head touches a platter, you can kiss your data goodbye. If you're lucky, the hard drive will immediately show operational problems. That's not at all special. Also, any modern drive will park its heads when it turns off (when the coil loses power, the permanent magnet pulls it out of the way).

Power cycles are determined by the user's choices, the OS' settings, and the quality of service from your electrical service provider.

AFAIK, WD Greens, and most Scorpios, automatically park the heads, though WD greens do it often enough to affect Linux performance. It's a Linux performance issue. Nothing to do with reliability.

Finally, what you want is a Red, not a Green. No head parking while not told to be idle, TLER, specified for greater vibration tolerance, wear-leveling (for WORM data), and not as expensive as REs.
 
M

Mfusick

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Dec 20, 2010
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Cerb said:
Neither.

All the quoted gibberish means is that WD has marketing weenies that are good at convincing people they are worth employing.

If a head touches a platter, you can kiss your data goodbye. If you're lucky, the hard drive will immediately show operational problems. That's not at all special. Also, any modern drive will park its heads when it turns off (when the coil loses power, the permanent magnet pulls it out of the way).

Power cycles are determined by the user's choices, the OS' settings, and the quality of service from your electrical service provider.

AFAIK, WD Greens, and most Scorpios, automatically park the heads, though WD greens do it often enough to affect Linux performance. It's a Linux performance issue. Nothing to do with reliability.

Finally, what you want is a Red, not a Green. No head parking while not told to be idle, TLER, specified for greater vibration tolerance, wear-leveling (for WORM data), and not as expensive as REs.
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Thanks for intelligent reply.
 
Turbonium

Turbonium

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Cerb: so a Red is basically as good or better than a Green in EVERY way, including power consumption? Interesting.
 
F

fuzzymath10

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Feb 17, 2010
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I do know that both my Greens (1.0 and 1.5TB EADS - from ~2009) make very little noise when active, then after a few seconds, they make an annoying buzz until they're used again, when the buzz goes away; I think this is related to a power saving feature. So, they're basically useless except when active or spun down. I recently got a 3TB Red, and it doesn't have this issue, nor do either of my 7200rpm Seagate drives (including a nearly 5-year old 7200.11) which only exhibit a low but unobtrusive hum probably from being 7200rpm.

I'm not sure if the new Greens eliminated this issue but I'm not willing to try them; I waited for a sale and got the 3TB red for $119 which I think is decent, and as low as I've seen the 3TB Green; I did get a 3TB Barracuda for $89 on Black Friday.
 
Cerb

Cerb

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Aug 26, 2000
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beginner99 said:
it's also more expensive.
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Yup. Green == AV < Blue < Black < RED < RE Green < RE. It's more expensive than a Blue, usually more than a Black, cheaper than a RE by a fair margin, but with a 3-yr warranty.

They know how to carve out their market niches, over at WDC.
 
birthdaymonkey

birthdaymonkey

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Oct 4, 2010
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My WD Green drives (currently down to two 2TB EARS) both have the head parking disabled via the wdidle3 utility, which requires a DOS bootdisk but otherwise isn't that annoying.

What was *really* annoying was the constant clicking of the drives as they parked their heads! Now they're virtually silent in my HTPC/server.
 
M

Mfusick

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birthdaymonkey said:
My WD Green drives (currently down to two 2TB EARS) both have the head parking disabled via the wdidle3 utility, which requires a DOS bootdisk but otherwise isn't that annoying.

What was *really* annoying was the constant clicking of the drives as they parked their heads! Now they're virtually silent in my HTPC/server.
Click to expand...

So disabling head parking actually made them stop clicking ?
 
R

rsutoratosu

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Feb 18, 2011
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All i know is all my greens went back for rma, 4 times in the last 2 month. Basically each drive failed 1-2 week after the other. and it is used in a 24/7 server operation.

5 2TB drive wd green ears rmaed, they send me back earx.

wdc-rma.jpg
 
Piotrsama

Piotrsama

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Feb 7, 2010
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birthdaymonkey said:
My WD Green drives (currently down to two 2TB EARS) both have the head parking disabled via the wdidle3 utility, which requires a DOS bootdisk but otherwise isn't that annoying.

What was *really* annoying was the constant clicking of the drives as they parked their heads! Now they're virtually silent in my HTPC/server.
Click to expand...

Question:
Even if you disable head parking.... when you turn off the PC, the heads gets parked, right?

rsutoratosu said:
All i know is all my greens went back for rma, 4 times in the last 2 month. Basically each drive failed 1-2 week after the other. and it is used in a 24/7 server operation.

5 2TB drive wd green ears rmaed, they send me back earx.

wdc-rma.jpg
Click to expand...

Are the EARX any better or they also failed?
 
birthdaymonkey

birthdaymonkey

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Oct 4, 2010
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Piotrsama said:
Question:
Even if you disable head parking.... when you turn off the PC, the heads gets parked, right?

Are the EARX any better or they also failed?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the heads are parked when the drive is powered down, as they are in any hard drive.

With all these reports of EARS drives going down, I'm just waiting for my two 24/7 2TB EARS drives to fail. Hopefully they'll do so before the warranty expires!

EDIT: I just checked the warranty and they have until September 2014 to croak.
 
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Cerb

Cerb

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Aug 26, 2000
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rsutoratosu said:
All i know is all my greens went back for rma, 4 times in the last 2 month. Basically each drive failed 1-2 week after the other. and it is used in a 24/7 server operation.

5 2TB drive wd green ears rmaed, they send me back earx.

wdc-rma.jpg
Click to expand...
It happens. I, OTOH, have yet to see a Green fail. Small sample sizes are magical.

Piotrsama said:
Question:
Even if you disable head parking.... when you turn off the PC, the heads gets parked, right?
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Yes. If power is cut to the armature, the head zooms off the platter, drawn by the permanent magnet.

exdeath said:
Still messing with magnetic heads? :(
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Still thinking everyone should have a $2k+ RAID array in their <$1k desktops and network-limited NAS boxes?
 
M

Mfusick

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rsutoratosu said:
All i know is all my greens went back for rma, 4 times in the last 2 month. Basically each drive failed 1-2 week after the other. and it is used in a 24/7 server operation.

5 2TB drive wd green ears rmaed, they send me back earx.

wdc-rma.jpg
Click to expand...




This sounds like me. Lol
 
R

rsutoratosu

Platinum Member
Feb 18, 2011
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Piotrsama said:
Question:
Even if you disable head parking.... when you turn off the PC, the heads gets parked, right?



Are the EARX any better or they also failed?
Click to expand...

not yet, most of the EARS failed after 1.9-2.1 years, so hopefully EARX are much better.
 
M

Mfusick

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Dec 20, 2010
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Much of HDD life is luck. Green drives just appear to have generally low endurance.
 
assassin24

assassin24

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Mar 27, 2005
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Mfusick said:
Much of HDD life is luck. Green drives just appear to have generally low endurance.
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I disagree.

I have multiple hard drives of all speeds and the Green drives that I use for storage are all still alive and well after multiple years. I have lost a few 7200RPM drives.

Doesn't mean that Green is good and Black is bad. You can't make an statistically significant conclusion unless your sample size is huge and using the exact same hard drive, platter size, firmware, other parts, etc.
 
S

sub.mesa

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Feb 16, 2010
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You can't make an statistically significant conclusion unless [..]
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Finally some words of wisdom!

The funny thing is that you guys are quarrelling over mostly firmware differences. Some might say: WD Green is bad because all that power saving crap is nonesense! While others might say that WD Reds are the only right choice for use with RAID arrays.

Of course, neither is true. Both are physically the same drives. WD just likes to annoy their customers by introducing two different products under the same product part number. Both Green and Red series come in different platter capacities. This leads to the Red getting better (lower) power consumption than the Green.

Some myths:
WD Green is not suitable for RAID (not suitable for low-quality RAID implementations, correct)
WD Green is not suitable for 24/7 (all drives are suitable for 24/7; all mechanical devices like nothing more than a static environment without any changes)
WD Green uses variable rpm called IntelliPower (no dude, it is static; dynamic rpm does not exist)
WD Green has high probability of failure (nonsense; it is physically the same as WD Red)
WD Green cannot be used in RAID arrays because it lacks TLER (only low-quality RAID implementations require TLER; 'proper' RAID likes WD Green just fine)
WD Green has that annoying headparking feature (true it is annoying; but 7200rpm drives also have it; it is not limited to green/5400rpm disks)
WD Green is slow (it is faster than many 7200rpm drives thanks to its high data density)
WD Green consumes even more power than WD Red (only if you do a false comparison between the 666GB platter version and 1000GB platter version)

As far as I know, the only differences between WD Green and WD Red:
- one year additional warranty (2 -> 3 years). Countries without warranty-protection by law will see an increase from 1 -> 3 years.
- Reds feature TLER=7 by default, while Greens have them locked at 120 seconds ('TLER disabled')
- Reds have headparking disabled while Greens require APM or wdidle to disable

Other than that, both drives are more than likely physically the same. Only the firmware and warranty is different. On the other hand, the 'RE' series more than likely is physically different, due to different specs on various mechanical components. Basically it is something between a consumer and enterprise drive with
 
S

spandexninja

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Mar 5, 2013
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My WD Scorpio Blue (2.5" 1TB) parks every 8 seconds and WD wdidle3 doesn't support the Scorpio Blue :(

I have to turn the APM to maximum performance in CrystalDiskInfo to stop it from constantly parking.
 
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