WD Greenpower external hdd

jakedude182 · 14 Jun 2010 at 23:45

Hi, I am looking at purchacing a 2TB external hdd, and here (competitor) it says it contains a hdd with greenpower technology.
I am very inexperienced with hard drive manufacturers, and don't know if this greenpower technology will provide slower speeds or faster?

Has anyone had any experience with WD hard drives. I only have a seagate at the moment, and that had firmware probs so I'm not going for them again.

Thanks, Jake

Atom · 14 Jun 2010 at 23:57

Best to remove that competitor link..

That external is usb2 so no need to worry about the speed of the WD Green inside..

Admiral Huddy · 16 Jun 2010 at 15:12

Jakedude182. You really need to read the FAQs and general rules before continuing to post.

Ripshod · 16 Jun 2010 at 18:58

As was stated by Atom:
'That external is usb2 so no need to worry about the speed of the WD Green inside..'

However, I've rippped a 1TB drive out of the case and fitted it internally. Sustained read speed with a large file regulary reaches 70-90MB/s. The 'Greenpower' savings of up to 40% on power are simply attained by running the drive at 5400rpm, accelerating to 7200rpm when required (this is totally invisible in use). And they do indeed run cooler.

Then get a cheap and nasty drive to fit in the external case, but because it won't be Greenpower you'd probably have to fit a cooling fan.

Around my area the external WDs are roughly the same price as an internal, and often cheaper. So if I want an internal, I'd buy an external 'MyBook', save a few pennies, and get an external case thrown in!! :rolleyes:

AbsenceJam · 16 Jun 2010 at 19:28

Ripshod said:
As was stated by Atom:
'That external is usb2 so no need to worry about the speed of the WD Green inside..'

However, I've rippped a 1TB drive out of the case and fitted it internally. Sustained read speed with a large file regulary reaches 70-90MB/s. The 'Greenpower' savings of up to 40% on power are simply attained by running the drive at 5400rpm, accelerating to 7200rpm when required (this is totally invisible in use). And they do indeed run cooler.

Then get a cheap and nasty drive to fit in the external case, but because it won't be Greenpower you'd probably have to fit a cooling fan.

Around my area the external WDs are roughly the same price as an internal, and often cheaper. So if I want an internal, I'd buy an external 'MyBook', save a few pennies, and get an external case thrown in!!

They are 5400rpm. They don't have variable speeds.

jakedude182 · 17 Jun 2010 at 11:56

Hi, sorry that I did not adhere to the rules in the 1st post, and posted that link for the WD Elements external drive that I was looking at. It turns out that inside the it was a WD20EARS, which is a caviar green drive, which you need to run a partitioning alignment tool to use with Win XP which I use most of the time. So I didn't buy.
I then looked at that drive to get for internal use. But somone with the same mobo as me said that it runs at around 3mb read/write because it will not work with older chipsets, so that would have been bad

I looked at various external HDDs, and they all had one problem or another that was regular in reveiws. Apparently the WD drives power units 'drop like flies'. And others such as the Freecom Thin 2TB had rare overheating issues due to no fans or cooling.

Apparently the WD mybooks, the newer ones have inbuilt software for making on the go backups that is not removable < built into the firmware. And that it uses two drive letters which could cause problems.

I looked at internal drives and bought a Samsung SpinPoint F3 EcoGreen 2TB (HD203WI) as it looked cheap. However on a competitor site quite a few people were saying that it came dead, or failed quite fast. So I will be sure to fully test it before making backups.
This one is also 5400rpm, and writes at 70-90mb/s and around 50mb when full and on the last few tracks.

I read that WD are keeping the actual speed of those variable rpm drives a close guarded secret. I just hope that these 'green' drives don't decide to go on sleep after say 20 mins of not being used, and then lagg when accessed.

I really did consider getting an external case. But was thrown by someones comment about the drive to put in not being 100% compatible unless the manufacturers for the external enclosure have stated that the specific drive models are compatible. Which is somthing that I have never seen.
Just assuming that all of the standards and specifications match you would think any SATA 2 drive would work in an enclosure suited to it right?

Cheers for ya feedback, Jake