is WD green drive ok with AAA games ?

[sam002fc]

i am at a loss to choose between two drives WD blue or green :/ and i am in need of more space so opting to get a green one over 1 tb blue one , ii would be mostly using it as my secondary AAA game drive
so performance wise is the WD green 2 tb is terrible or average and how is the reliability :/ can anybody describe that

 

[getochkn]

Get a blue. I hate green's. I ahve one in my NAS and it's slow, nevermind for games.

 

[kyzarvs]

As a dedicated games drive, you'll be hard pressed to notice. I've done a lot of testing with SSD vs WD Black vs NAS over a wired network - there's hardly any difference between any of them - games just aren't that IO limited. My daughter has a WD Green Steam drive, no issues at all (just over 150 games last time I looked)

This is presuming that you O/S drive is something else. Your O/S is extremely IO limited, so needs as quick as you can afford.

 

[Mark_1970]

i am at a loss to choose between two drives WD blue or green :/ and i am in need of more space so opting to get a green one over 1 tb blue one , ii would be mostly using it as my secondary AAA game drive
so performance wise is the WD green 2 tb is terrible or average and how is the reliability :/ can anybody describe that

The performance it going to be with you for years to come while playing games, why not spend the tiny bit more and buy a black?

 

[Archaic59]

WD Green drive is designed to be used as secondary storage and not meant for gaming. For gaming a WD Black is best followed by Blue.

 

[rhysiam]

I actually have a WD green drive with my games on it. Wasn't my first choice, but I already have an SSD for OS and someone gave me the drive for free, made it hard to justify the extra expense of a 7200RPM drive.

While it's fine, it doesn't have any affect in-game, load times are substantial. I've noticed that loads in games like XCom2 and Witcher 3 take a long, long time. If I was starting fresh the blue would for-sure be worth the extra few dollars IMHO. But if you already have a green it will work.

 

[kyzarvs]

I actually have a WD green drive with my games on it. Wasn't my first choice, but I already have an SSD for OS and someone gave me the drive for free, made it hard to justify the extra expense of a 7200RPM drive.

While it's fine, it doesn't have any affect in-game, load times are substantial. I've noticed that loads in games like XCom2 and Witcher 3 take a long, long time. If I was starting fresh the blue would for-sure be worth the extra few dollars IMHO. But if you already have a green it will work.

My daughter runs off a Green as her Steam drive (SSD O/S) - I've moved from WD Black, to SSD and finally to a remote 4-drive NAS for my Steam drive over the last few weeks - I've never seen her load times on the games we MP together (Far Cry3, TF2, CS:GO, L4D2, Broforce - but I doubt that one counts ) to be any different to mine - it was her Green vs my Black load time similarities that started me testing load times on various platforms.

 

[Archaic59]

I actually have a WD green drive with my games on it. Wasn't my first choice, but I already have an SSD for OS and someone gave me the drive for free, made it hard to justify the extra expense of a 7200RPM drive.

While it's fine, it doesn't have any affect in-game, load times are substantial. I've noticed that loads in games like XCom2 and Witcher 3 take a long, long time. If I was starting fresh the blue would for-sure be worth the extra few dollars IMHO. But if you already have a green it will work.

My daughter runs off a Green as her Steam drive (SSD O/S) - I've moved from WD Black, to SSD and finally to a remote 4-drive NAS for my Steam drive over the last few weeks - I've never seen her load times on the games we MP together (Far Cry3, TF2, CS:GO, L4D2, Broforce - but I doubt that one counts ) to be any different to mine - it was her Green vs my Black load time similarities that started me testing load times on various platforms.

The WD rep that works these forums said himself that the green drives are designed for secondary storage and not running games.

 

[kyzarvs]

I actually have a WD green drive with my games on it. Wasn't my first choice, but I already have an SSD for OS and someone gave me the drive for free, made it hard to justify the extra expense of a 7200RPM drive.

While it's fine, it doesn't have any affect in-game, load times are substantial. I've noticed that loads in games like XCom2 and Witcher 3 take a long, long time. If I was starting fresh the blue would for-sure be worth the extra few dollars IMHO. But if you already have a green it will work.

My daughter runs off a Green as her Steam drive (SSD O/S) - I've moved from WD Black, to SSD and finally to a remote 4-drive NAS for my Steam drive over the last few weeks - I've never seen her load times on the games we MP together (Far Cry3, TF2, CS:GO, L4D2, Broforce - but I doubt that one counts ) to be any different to mine - it was her Green vs my Black load time similarities that started me testing load times on various platforms.

The WD rep that works these forums said himself that the green drives are designed for secondary storage and not running games. Just because it will work does not mean it's something to recommend.

Games are overly stuffed with their own importance then

Games are infrequently changing data that isn't accessed very often - pretty much the definition of a large Steam library. I have roughly now 1TB of games, of which I access one game at a time - let's be generous and say that it's always GTA-V at 65GB, meaning 945GB of data is unread for weeks, months, years (looking at you BloodRayne2) at a time. Most of the IO appears at load time - say a minute or so, after that it's almost inconsequential access of audio and textures at a very low background level. From a DBA analyst point of view that is exactly what secondary storage is. Games from a storage point of view just aren't that taxing.

Our NAS setups (I own an IT company) use WD Reds for the low-end arrays we need - these are more optimised for larger queue depths and have some other bells n' whistles to keep them humming along nicely in a RAID environment that has requests from multiple sources all at once. My current Steam drive hitches onto one of our NAS clusters that holds and replicates 14TB of data, of which over 50% is re-written and replicated across multiple clusters every day. THAT is not the definition of secondary storage, someone firing up CS:GO every night is.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, sam002fc!

We have made some changes to simplify the product selection of hard drives for you by consolidating our mainstream PC products to only the WD Blue brand. The WD Green as you know it is no longer in available and it is now in the 5,400 RPM-class of the WD Blue family.

The WD Blue that you should consider is the one in the 7,200 RPM class. It would easily be able to withstand the gameplay demands without bottlenecking the performance. If you are considering any high-end gaming in the future, I'd strongly recommend you check the WD Black models instead.

The WD Blue drives larger than 1 TB are in the 5,400 RPM class and are a great secondary storage alternative for your massive data. They incorporate the IntelliSeek feature that calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

Hope this helps. Keep us posted if you have any additional questions!
SuperSoph_WD