Are those "green" drives any good?
 

I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in
my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and
low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was
important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway,
when storing media files over a home network :)

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing
these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?


As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should
be fine.


The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the
enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you
don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup...

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

Daniel Troeder wrote:
> I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in
> my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and
> low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was
> important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway,
> when storing media files over a home network :)
>
>



Sounds like these drives are going to be OK then. My concern was that
they would be made "cheaper" and not be as reliable but it seems folks
are happy with them which is good.

I like WD drives. The one drive I have had fail was a WD. I have a few
of them so maybe it is just a bad apple or is it a lemon? Anyway.

I'm getting quite a collection of videos and stuff. I'm thinking 2Tb or
3Tb. The 3Tb is more expensive but it will take longer to fill it up.
Decisions. Decisions. Maybe newegg will have a BIG sale soon.

While on the thread. Has anyone had any sort of luck with the
recertified drives? I see them sometimes and wonder what the deal is.
Are they repaired drives or just returned drives? Anyone have any
experience, good or bad, with those?

Thanks for the replies. Sounds good so far.

Dale

:-) :-)

--
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or
how you interpreted my words!

Miss the compile output? Hint:
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--quiet-build=n"

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On 05/09/2012 07:47 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
> As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should
> be fine.
>
> The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the
> enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you
> don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID
> setup...

AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an
enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at
least, it isn't supposed to.

Consumer drives will acknowledge writes before they have hit the
platter, even if the cache is disabled on the drive (and some consumer
drives do not even allow the cache to be disabled).

The only scenario this seriously guards against is unexpected power
loss, where the drive has told the OS that the data has been written to
disk, but it is somewhere in-between (e.g., on cache, but not on the
platter) and then the power is disconnected from the unit (specifically,
the drive itself). Even an unexpected reboot from the computer won't
affect this, unless the computer removes power to the device during
early boot (and on x86 systems, that is a virtual impossibility).

--- Mike

--
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
--- Carveth Read, “Logic”

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org> wrote:
> On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
>> videos on, eventually. *The prices are coming down now. *I keep seeing
>> these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
>> *When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?
>
>
> As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be
> fine.
>
> The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the
> enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you
> don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup...
>

+1

I use the WD 1TB Green drive for storing video outside my machine
using both USB & eSATA. Works fine. Very quite, cool. Way faster than
necessary for streaming movies. Nice.

As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support
time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view
of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in
any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to
Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years.

HTH,
Mark

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

Am Mittwoch, 9. Mai 2012, 03:47:09 schrieb Dale:
> Hi,
>
> As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
> videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing
> these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
> When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?
> Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more
> efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no
> difference?
>
> I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much
> I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference.
> Data speeds seem to be about the same.
>
> Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other
> brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck
> with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one
> of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a
> horror story about some brand.
>
> Thanks much.
>
> Dale
>
> :-) :-)

samsung here. Put that beast into an esata case. Sometimes I forget to turn it
off, because it is so silent. And cool. The others should be similar. They are
slower, yes, but fast enough to watch video.

7200 for stuff that needs some speed.
5400 for video and backups.

just fine.

--
#163933

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On 2012-05-09 8:06 AM, mike@trausch.us <mike@trausch.us> wrote:

AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an
enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at
least, it isn't supposed to.


There's a bit more to it than that...

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_ .pdf

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:

>

> As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support

> time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view

> of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in

> any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to

> Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years.

>


I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays.


But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be 'more forgiving'?


Rgds,

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
>
> On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support
>> time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view
>> of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in
>> any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to
>> Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years.
>>
>
> I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays.
>
> But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be
> 'more forgiving'?
>
> Rgds,

Possibly. Someone with more experience with mdadm probably could do a
better job but I'd never done RAID of any type at that time (I'm just
a home user who taught myself whatever little I know about Linux
through this list) and built this server with 5 drives to run a number
of Windows VMs so I was pretty sure I wanted RAID. I bought the WD
Green 1TB drives a little over 2 years ago and had multiple problems.
First problem was the 4K sector size issue which was fairly new at
that time, and then once I got past that I tried RAID and it still
didn't work well at all.

The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from
WD called something like wdtwiddle or something silly as I remember it
but I decided to cut my storage in half and replaced the 1TB Green
drives with 500GB Enterprise drives.

Since then I've heard of people using Green drives for RAID and doing
fine but it didn't work with the ones I purchased.

- Mark

Are those "green" drives any good?
 

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from
> WD called something like wdtwiddle or something

WDTLER :)