Western Digital Green?

tomparker95 · 4 Mar 2013 at 22:34

Anyone had any experiences with these? Just ordered a 2TB one for my new build. Reviews on Amazon say it's good, but just wondering if anyone has any personal thoughts on it? Cheers!

unleashed · 6 Mar 2013 at 07:50

2TB WD Greens have been around for such a long time. Not much to say about them really except I have had one fail at about 18 months in, WD warranty is A1 IMO.

RevBillyG · 6 Mar 2013 at 10:47

I've had one for a couple of years. No problems but it's very slow. Only good for storage really.

IRLeetly · 6 Mar 2013 at 11:10

I bought a 1TB one when a certain american electronics chain shut down. 18 months on and the drive is still doing a great job as a storage drive.

x22dan · 6 Mar 2013 at 11:32

I had a 1TB one for the last 3 years and its not failed once...

Also purchased a 3TB version of it which i'm still yet to test.

Phil2008 · 6 Mar 2013 at 11:58

This is a benchmark of my new 2tb green, I got a few weeks ago..........

zakblood · 6 Mar 2013 at 12:04

drives is known to be good on large files, poor on smaller ones

Maundie · 6 Mar 2013 at 12:15

Would the be any good in a NAS or would I be better getting the Reds?

P3N9U1N · 6 Mar 2013 at 12:18

Had a 2tb green which failed on me a few months later. Got it replaced and sold it.

Performance was pretty poor, but I suspect I just had a bad egg

zakblood · 6 Mar 2013 at 12:21

Maundie said:
Would the be any good in a NAS or would I be better getting the Reds?

red

tomparker95 · 7 Mar 2013 at 11:07

Bit average then...ah well, brought it now so have to use it. Cheers for the feedback tho

Zaim · 7 Mar 2013 at 11:24

WD Greens are awesome, I had 4 running in a NAS for 2 years, no issue's what so ever, I even have 3 in my PC right now, Excellent drives, run cool and quiet.

Phil2008 · 7 Mar 2013 at 11:51

tomparker95 said:
Bit average then...ah well, brought it now so have to use it. Cheers for the feedback tho

You buy the right drive for the job, so if your only using it for backing up and media,, the greens are perfect for that, as speed isnt important.

deshepherd · 7 Mar 2013 at 12:31

Probably worth googling "caviar green head parking" and "WDIDLE3" as for power reasons WD were very aggressive at spinning down and parking heads with green drives. Link that with a NAS based on linux which may do regular disk accesses but far enough apart to allow the disk to spin down then the head park count climbs rapidly and in worst case scenarios can reach the level for SMART to consider the drive to be past its us limit in a few months. WDIDLE3 is a utility that allows the head park time (default is only 8 secs idle time) to be set to something larger or disabled completely.

I have a 2TB WD green in my NAS ... its a data only drive (i.e. not the linux system drive) so doesn't suffer as severely from this but in first couple of weeks head cycle count reach ~7-8000. I then ran WDIDLE3 to set idle time to 5 mins (max setting - other than disable completely) and after that its only cimbed by ~100 per week.

Duke · 7 Mar 2013 at 14:21

Does that tool work for other drives? I've got two 2tb seagates in a NAS that have a similar problem.

edit: only for WD it seems.

divuk83 · 7 Mar 2013 at 20:00

If it's for a NAS get the WD reds. My NAS started out with 2x2tb greens of which both have failed just within warranty and have since been replaced with reds. Neither suddenly failed but they started to produce smart errors and were in raid 1 so it didn't really cause any serious problems. WD's warranty is really, really good with advance replacement available so you get a new one sent straight out. Its also worth noting that the reds are ever so slightly quieter (not that either are exactly loud) and the reds run about 3 degrees cooler than the greens according the the smart readings from my NAS.

Dave

r0cky · 8 Mar 2013 at 13:35

I've got a few WD Green drives, so far so good!

tomparker95 · 8 Mar 2013 at 14:11

Im just gonna be using it put Windows on and have games/media etc on it. On a budget build so need as much space for pound as I could get so 2TB for £70 seemed a good deal. Will have to just wait and see what happens, sure it will be fine and wasn't really expecting anything mega fast anyway.

Havana_UK · 8 Mar 2013 at 14:28

Only experience I've had of WD Greens has been in my Sky HD box (original Thompson one) where I upgraded the original driver to a 1TB WD Green. The box is ropey at best, but the drive has been thoroughly used for 4 years and still going strong.

I've use WD HDDs for years (mostly the Caviar Blacks & Blues) and only ever had one actually fail, which was a 11 year old WD Black 250GB. Current machines are running a 1TB Blue in main PC as storage / games drive, and a 250GB Black as main drive in 2nd PC.

I'm using Caviar Reds (2 x 3TB) in my NAS box, but they're only a couple of months old and haven't done much work yet to speak of.

I've also got a couple of the portable USB powered 2.5" drives (one 250GB, one 320GB) and again, while they've not exactly been hammered, both seem to be good build quality and very reliable.

Overall I'm very impressed with WD drives, always have been, and given the choice would always pick them over other HDD brands.

xlife · 11 Mar 2013 at 17:41

I've purchased several drives since the 640GB Caviar Blue. Was very impressed at the time with the low noise levels (both at idle and during seek) and performance. I've since purchased the 640BG Caviar Black and the 2TB Caviar Green. I had some failing sectors towards the end of the 2TB Green drive but Western Digital's warranty was very good: quick and no hassles. They sent me a 3TB drive in return so hopefully I won't be needing to buy any new mechanical drives any time soon.

I did run the widle3 software to change the head parking idle timeout from 8 seconds to 300 seconds on the new drive however, as I was getting a fairly high load/unload count and in certain circumstances the drive would be parking/unparking frequently causing an annoying noise. So I would recommend monitoring the load/unload count and consider changing the idle3 timeout. Other than that, it's an excellent drive. Seriously quick for big files as I think there's only 4 high density platters making up the 3TB.