I need Opinions about the WD20EARS! Caviar Green

[tritono9]

Hey!

Im J.P, I need your advice.

Actually I have 2 Caviar Black of 1 Tb each one, Sata II. This hard drivers are awesome, Im very happy with them.

However, I need to buy a new HD because I have full the capacity of them. I need more capacity.

Because of that, Im thinking in the WD20EARS Caviar Green more than in a new 1 Tb Caviar Black again. My concerns about is that I dont have experience with the Caviar Green line: I dont know how reliable they are. I need stability and reliability in the long way, I will put extreme important information in the new HD. I need that and the space more than the velocity.

For example, I read that the WD20EARS dont live so long like a Caviar Black because some problems with the robotic arm in the HD (I dont remember the exact words) when the robotic arm is deposited in a side to spent less electricity. Plus, the WD20EARS is Sata 3, I have the connection in my Mobo but I dont have experience with it. Is stable as Sata II?

So this is my situation What to buy: 1 Tb of Caviar Black tested or 2 Tb (I really need the space) of Caviar Green withouth knowing if I will be safe.

What do you think?

Thank you! 🙂

 

[Saga Lout]

Because of that, Im thinking in the WD20EARS Caviar Green

What do you think?

Thank you! 🙂

Hello, J. P. I don't want to come across as biased or anything but I took a brand new WD Caviar Green 500Gb out of the box yesterday and when it's connected in place of the dead Samsung 1Tb it's replacing, it throws all sorts of silly error messages in an XP installation. I'm seeing all sorts of odd filenames that can't be loaded and in well over a thousand installations of XP, I've never had this before.

Now I can't be sure that this is down to the WD but at the moment it's slaved into this machine for partitioning and formatting and if it plays up when it gets back to the customer's box, it's going back to Bluepoint before lunchtime!

Good luck with yours. 😀

 

[jonpaul37]

if it is within your budget, go with the Black version or better yet, go with a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB model, it will be faster and less expensive.

 

[sminlal]

I have a WD20EARS drive, it works just fine and does exactly what I expected it to do.

The "Green" drives are designed for low power consumption - they spin at a slower rate and they shut themselves down if they're idle for a while, then automatically spin back up again when accessed. They're excellent for bulk storage, but if performance is important to you then you should use a "black" drive.

Note that any disk drive can fail at any time. If you data is critical and you can't afford to loose it then you need to keep a second copy of it on another drive. To eliminate other risks (viruses, power surges, accidental deletion, etc.) the other drive should NOT be permanently connected to your computer, and if you can store it offsite then you'll also eliminate risks such as theft or disaster.

 

[tritono9]

hey!

Thank you. This time, I need more space than velocity. I will not use the HD for OS or extreme programs (Pro Tools, Photoshop, etc), my intention is leave the new HD only for data storage. I dont need lightning velocity but I will need to play 1080 videos and thigs like that.

There are two things that atract me for the Caviar Green: the space and the low heat/power thing. But today I enter at the WD Forum and I in the first page there are only most post aboyt the caviar greens than other discs.

Maybe I need to sacrifice space and get the Black even if I dont need all the velocity right now. I just want to be safe, but I really need 2 tb this time and I cant afford a Caviar Black of that size plus there arent stock in my country of them.

saga good luck with you too, Im almost decided for the Caviar Black, but the 2tb thing is so relevant for me!

What do you think?

 

[sminlal]

The "EARS" drives are different than most other drives in that they use a 4KByte sector size. This can cause performance problems with older operating systems like XP which don't create disk partitions on the correct sector boundaries. If you have XP then you need to use a special utility to create the partitions in order to make sure they're aligned properly. If you have Vista or Windows 7, you don't have to worry about this because they will create the partitions correctly.

Once the partitions have been properly created you can completely forget about this and the drive will work just fine. I use Windows 7 so I just plugged my brand new drive in, used Disk Management to create one 2TB partition, formatted it as NTFS, and then I was off to the races. The drive's worked perfectly and I don't have a single bad word to say about it.

 

[tritono9]

Thank you!

Yeah, I know that about the Advanced Format. Im using Win 7 x64 too.

There are two things that worries me about this hd: the thing that I readed about the robotic arm that is parking constantly after 7-8 seconds of idle activity and if I can play my media files comfortably with this HD.

I was in the WD forum and I saw that most of the problem threads had Green drives.

I really need the space of the Caviar Green. But I had very good experience with the caviar black.

AAH! I need to ask the last but very important thing. I know that green use 4k sectors. I put a Caviar Black with 4k sectors because I dont know that in the past. So I have a Standard format drive (Caviar Black) with 4k sectors and today I read that Caviar Blacks use like 512 size sector. Is a bad thing? can im damaging my hd!?

Thank you for your time 🙂

 

[sminlal]

The 4K sector thing isn't specific to Green drives, it applies to many of the newer drives whether they're Green or Black. You can't damage the drive if you get it wrong, you'll just get poorer performance.

A lot of people seem to be getting hung up by the self-parking thing on the Green drives, but IMHO it's really not that big an issue. First of all, it's not like the old days where the heads actually rest on the media when it spins down - the new drives have offloading ramps so that the heads never touch the media. This means there isn't any extra wear created when the heads are parked.

Secondly, the biggest concerns seem to be that the load/unload counts for the Green drives get really high - but for the most part this is only a concern if you use these drives for the operating system. The OS accesses the drive very regularly, so the drive is constantly getting reactivated after it spins down. But green drives aren't really a very good choice as the OS drive anyway because of their lower performance.

If you're planning to use the drive as a data drive then it's not going to be a problem at all, since data drives don't get that same kind of automatic regular access. I've been using a green drive for data for about a year now, and it has a load/unload cycle count of less than 3000, or well under 10 per day. That's just not something that you need to worry about.

 

[tritono9]

The 4K sector thing isn't specific to Green drives, it applies to many of the newer drives whether they're Green or Black. You can't damage the drive if you get it wrong, you'll just get poorer performance.

A lot of people seem to be getting hung up by the self-parking thing on the Green drives, but IMHO it's really not that big an issue. First of all, it's not like the old days where the heads actually rest on the media when it spins down - the new drives have offloading ramps so that the heads never touch the media. This means there isn't any extra wear created when the heads are parked.

Secondly, the biggest concerns seem to be that the load/unload counts for the Green drives get really high - but for the most part this is only a concern if you use these drives for the operating system. The OS accesses the drive very regularly, so the drive is constantly getting reactivated after it spins down. But green drives aren't really a very good choice as the OS drive anyway because of their lower performance.

If you're planning to use the drive as a data drive then it's not going to be a problem at all, since data drives don't get that same kind of automatic regular access. I've been using a green drive for data for about a year now, and it has a load/unload cycle count of less than 3000, or well under 10 per day. That's just not something that you need to worry about.

hey man, thank you for your help.

How I can know how times a HD load/unload?

I will storage all my info in the new HD, not for OS, but I use alot the info: I play music and videos all the time. Do you think that the Caviar Green is a good option?

 

[sminlal]

I think a green drive is an good match for what you need. Music and video playback doesn't require fast transfer rates, and will read the drive often enough so that it won't spin down until you actually stop watching/listening.

You can get the drive cycle counts using a utility such as "DiskCheckup" which displays the drive's SMART data.

 

[tritono9]

Best answer selected by tritono9.