Slow access on WD Green drive

madindehead · 23 Mar 2015 at 16:38

Hey guys,

I'm using a WD Green drive for my documents and downloads. When I download something, and use the "View in folder" option from Chrome, Windows Explorer shows the Downloads folder as empty for a few seconds, and then takes a while to load what's actually in there. The same happens if I open My Documents.

Is this because of the low speed nature of the WD Green drive? If so, what's a faster alternative?

Or is this indicative of another problem? Any tests I can run to check it out?

lude1962 · 23 Mar 2015 at 17:26

'Is this because of the low speed nature of the WD Green drive?' - yes they power down after a very short time
' If so, what's a faster alternative?' - wd wise blue red or black.

madindehead · 23 Mar 2015 at 17:38

lude1962 said:
'Is this because of the low speed nature of the WD Green drive?' - yes they power down after a very short time
' If so, what's a faster alternative?' - wd wise blue red or black.

If I have my hard drive power down option set to "Never", I'm guessing the Greens still power down regardless of the Windows setting.

I assumed I would need a Red or Black to replace it. The fact that it takes time to power up can be slightly annoying.

Akagi · 23 Mar 2015 at 17:42

My WD Green annoys me too, it powers down regardless of Windows settings, and then I have to wait for it to spin up before I can access things on it. It also sometimes powers off when I'm listening to music that is stored on it, the music pauses, and then it thinks "Oh, right!" and spins back up. Grrrr!

If it annoys you that much, get a WD Blue or a WD Black, or one of the new Toshiba/Hitachi drives.

Telecaster · 23 Mar 2015 at 17:45

Acme said:
It also sometimes powers off when I'm listening to music that is stored on it, the music pauses, and then it thinks "Oh, right!" and spins back up. Grrrr!

Hmm, I'm not sure it should be doing that TBH, mine never has and I use it as my main music server drive with over 2TB of music on it, if I'm listening to music or watching a film from it then it never powers down in use :confused:

madindehead · 23 Mar 2015 at 18:12

Telecaster said:
Hmm, I'm not sure it should be doing that TBH, mine never has and I use it as my main music server drive with over 2TB of music on it, if I'm listening to music or watching a film from it then it never powers down in use

Mine used to power down if I paused a movie for ages, but this was because hard drives were set to power down. However, the access time on the Green seems awful now. I'll probably just replace it. Quite annoying that it almost hangs Explorer as you try to access it though.

Sadly you can't get Blue drives in high capacities. Are the Enterprise drives good? Seem a bit cheaper than the Blacks.

Akagi · 23 Mar 2015 at 18:20

Telecaster said:
Hmm, I'm not sure it should be doing that TBH, mine never has and I use it as my main music server drive with over 2TB of music on it, if I'm listening to music or watching a film from it then it never powers down in use

Weirdly mine doesn't do it when I'm watching videos that are stored on it, but it does do it occasionally with music.

Frozennova · 23 Mar 2015 at 18:32

WD Red is probably to best compromise.

Slightly better performance as the Green but aimed at similar workloads

megatron · 24 Mar 2015 at 15:24

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18338177

See if this helps.^

DragonQ · 24 Mar 2015 at 15:30

They do power down after a short period of no use. Whenever I want to browse the files on my server (about half the drives in which are WD Greens), it takes 10 or so seconds to actually get access. That's kinda the point though - the drives being spun down 95% of the time saves power.

I believe WD has a utility that allows you to change the timeout before the spindown occurs.