Wester digital 1tb

Ade74 · 8 Jan 2009 at 21:05

Whats the differences between

Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD1001FALS)

and

Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD10EADS)

I allready have one of the greens for storage are the black's much faster I want to install the os on the next one as well as creating a partition for more storage also.

the comps on 24/7 how much is the green likely to save in electricity?

DigitalReaper · 8 Jan 2009 at 21:28

Not a great deal, maybe £5-10 per year.

ChrisLX200 · 8 Jan 2009 at 22:34

I just ordered a Black and it should be here tomorrow, but I don't have a Green to compare with directly. As above, savings will be small, and if it's a storage drive you can set it to spin down when not in use so makes no difference.

Ade74 · 9 Jan 2009 at 07:39

ChrisLX200 said:
I just ordered a Black and it should be here tomorrow, but I don't have a Green to compare with directly. As above, savings will be small, and if it's a storage drive you can set it to spin down when not in use so makes no difference.

Why did you go for the black over the green?

drunkenmaster · 9 Jan 2009 at 10:10

THe blacks aimed more at server duties isn't it, its got jawesome IO performance apparently, frankly utterly spanking the Seagate/hitachi/Samsung equivilents in number of IO operations but isn't quite as good with transfer speeds, not really sure how they got it quite so good with I would assume small writes and access time but its pretty decent.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=368&devID_1=361&devID_2=369&devCnt=3

the multiuser section of tests its pretty far ahead, 10% at really its lowest, in the last few tests its closer to 50% ahead. The only sucky thing about the site is, without a few tests you've actually heard of before, some crysis load times some copy 2gb file times etc then its hard to tell how that actually translates into performance.

Likewise you can get the new Hitachi 1gb's for £65 which are 375gb platters and seemingly excellent performance, almost 50% more for the same capacity and I somehow doubt it offers much more performance in the real world, if any.

marscay · 9 Jan 2009 at 12:04

I'd never buy another Hitachi drive no matter what the cost saving, junk.

drunkenmaster · 9 Jan 2009 at 12:31

marscay said:
I'd never buy another Hitachi drive no matter what the cost saving, junk.

let me guess, you had one die and swear by another brand now and in any thread about that brand having a fault you go in and say "well i've had loads and they never die, but i had a hitachi and it died, the whole brand is tosh".

I'll let you in on a little secret, EVERY company has problems, every company will have one bad drive that falls down more often than other brands and their other drives, every company even on their most reliable drives will have one fail, FACT.

Hitachi, very fast, fantastic in raid 0, pretty quiet, quiet low power usage and as reliable as any other drive. Still got IBM 120gxp's that chug along fairly fast that haven't broken, not every drive dies

You know what will happen when my two new 640gb hitachi's die, if they do, I won't eat my words, I'll say, damn, that happens to all drives, that was unlucky and i'll get two more.

Ade74 · 9 Jan 2009 at 13:12

drunkenmaster said:
THe blacks aimed more at server duties isn't it, its got jawesome IO performance apparently, frankly utterly spanking the Seagate/hitachi/Samsung equivilents in number of IO operations but isn't quite as good with transfer speeds, not really sure how they got it quite so good with I would assume small writes and access time but its pretty decent.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=368&devID_1=361&devID_2=369&devCnt=3

the multiuser section of tests its pretty far ahead, 10% at really its lowest, in the last few tests its closer to 50% ahead. The only sucky thing about the site is, without a few tests you've actually heard of before, some crysis load times some copy 2gb file times etc then its hard to tell how that actually translates into performance.

I don't really know what this means.

i want to partition it so I can install os on say 200 gb partition and the rest as more storage. I ocasionally do some video encoding and Play wow will the black make much of a difference to the perfomance of the OS

drunkenmaster · 9 Jan 2009 at 15:12

Not a clue

I highlighted that yeah, it wins sythetic benchmarks which being the multi-user ones are most likely heavily command queue based reading of small files, like multiple people asking for different small web pages. The problem with their test suite is at the end of the day for many people showing us how long it takes to load Crysis, Photoshop and do a video encode behind it would be more quantifiable.

From that benchmark I would say its geared towards multiple small reads rather than pure transfer speed, the more single user office/gaming tests they did swung the way of the Hitachi which is cheaper, uses a little less power and so is probably the better choice.

THe green will probably not be as fast at anything, but save you a tiny amount in power, be quieter when not in full swing and should be more than enough for most people tbh. I think waiting for a few more reviews might be your best bet if you definately want a WD, should be some comparisons soon you'd think.

ChrisLX200 · 9 Jan 2009 at 18:23

I've had a large number of drives die on me over the years, maybe 50 odd, but never had one that was dead out of the box. Until today. My new WD Black 1TB is DOA. Spent a couple hours mucking around with it as I thought it must be my computer, but no - it's junk. Not put me off WD though, as said above - all manufacturers have a % failures, I've been lucky up to now with new drives.