Critical Design Flaw Found in WD Caviar Green HDDs

I hope this topic does not get deleted. I didn't know about this so I think you for bringing it to my attention (considering buying more HDDs for my machine).

At least there is a solution available though it requires some effort from the user.
 
Mine died after 6 months but I'm pretty sure it (and its replacement) never park(ed) its heads since I got/get an instant response when viewing the drive in Explorer.

Maybe it's to do with Windows power settings?
 
Old news, and calling it a "critical design flaw" is overstating the case - WD Green drives have had this feature for ages, and their overall failure rates don't seem to have been unduly affected.

There's a discussion at SilentPCReview (started in Dec 2008) which goes into a fair bit of detail if anyone's interested. :)

edit: oops, I just realised the article linked in the OP refers back to the SPCR forum thread anyway.
 
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I think this has already been address by WD.
If you dont want your drive parking its head every 8 sec you can run this utility wdidle3 to completely stop it parking its head or increase its timer.
 
Didn't know this! But even with this their failure rates is still one of the lowest compared to other brands haha. I'm going to check to see if mine needs disabling.

^ Yeah, only the green drives because they're the only ones with the intellipark feature.

Edit: :eek: ! No way! That's insane!

Load Cycle Count of my WD Black which I've had on for 3000 hours = 440
Load Cycle Count of my WD Green which I've had on for 4400 hours = 154,000

Lol.
 
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Uh, i have 2 of these WD Green HDDs. Using them both for storage.

The first one I got was DOA. Not had any problems with them since... touch wood I won't either.
 
It's not really a design flaw is it, given that they're also still shipping them and it's just the bios that needs updating which is of course optional.

The articles states the following, note the words in bold:
• Possibly shortens life-time of the HDD.
• Possibly reduces performance of the HDD.
The other two issues it states, well all drives do that when they power up/down so is normal behaviour but it just happens more often in this case as it powers down every 8 or so secs.

Wouldnt be surprised if this is just scaremongering. WD probably did a lot of research and redesign to optimise for reliability also.
 
I had a 1TB Green die after about 6months. No idea if this was to blame. But it's the only recent HDD i've had that has died out of the blue in a long time.
 
panyan said:
why would WD confirm the issue and release the bios utility to edit the settings if it wasnt true?
Click to expand...
Because when people see large load/unload counts in their SMART data, they tend to panic, regardless of whether or not it actually matters.

Honestly, it's been two and a half years since the "problem" first became common knowledge, and if there were any evidence that WD Greens were inherently unreliable it would have come to light by now (hopefully no-one will take statements like "I had one of those drives, it died after 'X' months" as being statistically significant).
 
Regeneration said:
Could please provide a SMART screenshot?
Click to expand...

Sure can.

WD640Black.jpg


WD1500Green.jpg


Fixed it now though and hasn't gone up in value since the morning.
 
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