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Thread: Western Digital Caviar Green internal SATA hard drives - A good buy? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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Powhatan
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Oct 20, 2009 Post Count: 58 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Looking to replace my old noisy internal hard drive:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380013AS 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive with a new: Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive or: Western Digital AV-GP WD5000AVDS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal AV Hard Drive Both are suppose to use less power and be quiet. I just wanted to make sure these would be good drives for the I/O intensive applications. Any pros or cons about WD Green drives?  SSD's are out of my price range. Would WD Blue or WD Black drives be better for the I/O intensive applications? Those are bit more expensive.My motherboard specs supports up to SATA2 3.0 Gb/s interfaces. The OS is Windows Vista x64, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, AMD Athlon II x2 dual-core 3.3 GB 2 MB L2 cache, with the one internal hard drive. It's just a basic home built computer. Thanks in advance. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The "Black" versions are the fastest of the Western Digital drives, that's the one I would go for.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The "Black" versions are the fastest of the Western Digital drives, that's the one I would go for.
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Powhatan
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Oct 20, 2009 Post Count: 58 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Here's some specs on my current drive and the WD drives I'm considering. Surprising, the WD Blue is the loudest. The WD Black consumes less power and is quieter than the WD Blue. For a cruncher that will be on 24/7/365, the WD Green would seem the obvious choice. I may get the Green since it doesn't cost that much and if it doesn't perform as well as I would like, then I'll get the Black.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380013AS 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Sound Emission 25 dB Idle 25 dB Quiet Seek 31 dB Performance Seek Power Consumption 12.5W Seek 12W Read/Write 7.5W Idle 0.7W Standby Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive $39.99 USD Acoustics Idle Mode 21 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 22 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 22 dBA (average) Power Dissipation Read/Write 4.13 Watts Idle 2.18 Watts Standby 0.77 Watts Sleep 0.75 Watts Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive $42.99 USD Acoustics Idle Mode 28 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 33 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 29 dBA (average) Power Dissipation Read/Write 8.77 Watts Idle 8.40 Watts Standby 0.97 Watts Sleep 0.97 Watts Western Digital Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive $62.99 USD Acoustics Idle Mode 25 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 29 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 26 dBA (average) Power Dissipation Read/Write 8.30 Watts Idle 7.70 Watts Standby 1.00 Watts Sleep 1.00 Watts |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Here's what I know about it:
* The WD Greens park the heads frequently to save power, and may be a poor match for anything using the disk 24/7. Worst case scenario, you get a head park every 10 seconds 24 hours a day, which wears out the disk far quicker than normal. See this thread in the WD forums and Google. * The WD Green "park head every ten seconds" can be turned off, there's a utility for this on WD's website. * I have a WD Green WD15EADS (1.5 TB, a couple of years old), and the performance is not a problem for WCG crunching. (On Linux, with a few tweaks, head parking turned off and the OS running off a different disk.) * The AV-GP models are made especially for 'streaming' applications that write to disk constantly, and may be a better fit. WD Green benefits: Quiet (less noisy than my Seagate Barracuda LP disks), low power, reasonable price and performance. Disclaimer: I have never tried the Greens as system disks, only as dedicated storage disks. |
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Powhatan
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Oct 20, 2009 Post Count: 58 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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@waitingForTheMiracle
Great information. That frequent head park makes the Green a bad choice for a primary drive. Looks like it's really meant as a seconday storage drive. @Snow Crash Thanks for the Black recommendation. |
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ngmwcg
Cruncher Joined: Jan 2, 2010 Post Count: 18 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Beware!!!
Older drives were generally 7200RPM for the past 10 or 20 years. But consumer drives are getting slower. Manufacturers have stopped advertising spindle speeds because they are going back to 5400RPM spindles and 5900RPM spindles, which are simply too slow for video. Low power is a major red flag, because it is generally achieved by using these slower spindle speeds. I don't know why anyone would opt for a low power drive? Maybe because it sounds like low energy? Low power and low energy are two totally different things. Low power involves the amount of juice consumed at any moment in time, while low energy takes into account the duration that one is consuming power. Thus if you care about battery life or the environment, you're looking for low energy, not low power. A low power drive is not going to save energy if it needs to run for twice as long to perform the same task as a high power drive. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Looks like it's really meant as a seconday storage drive. I think that was the original intention, yes. Use case: You have a small, fast primary drive, but need more space for your music, pictures and videos - buy the WD Green as a secondary drive. It's great for that purpose.I don't know why anyone would opt for a low power drive? I can't speak for others, but for myself: 1) Because less power normally means less heat and less noise. I care moderately about power consumption, but I care a lot about noise. 2) Because most of my drives are idle 99% of the time, in a home server/NAS, storing video etc.; meant to be available 24/7 but actually used only occasionally. I don't necessarily mind spending more power/energy for more performance, but I object to spending more power/energy than strictly necessary for doing nothing. 3) Because I have yet to consider disk performance an actual issue. Even my slowest laptop drive, about a third of the performance of WD Green, is fast enough for what I use it for. This could be because a) I have enough RAM to never use swap space, b) all my computers have a dedicated OS drive and separate storage drives, so a disk-heavy app gets to use the full bandwidth of the drive without fighting the OS, c) the OS disk cache does a good job, d) I simply don't have/use many very disk-demanding applications, e) all of the above. YMMV. |
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David Autumns
Ace Cruncher UK Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 11062 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi Powhatan
----------------------------------------I thought so until yesterday I have been running a 1Tb WD10EARS for about a year now alongside my SSD (see link in sig) and it works a treat and is very quiet and cool. It takes a while to spin up and makes an unusual (quiet) sound when running and herein lies the issue I wanted to run something similar in RAID mode (2 disks acting as one or 2 disks keeping the same data copied to each) but because of it's variable spin speed which is down to it's incredible greeness it's possible for the raid array to fail as the 2 disks do not run together. The latency between the 2 drives means that RAID on a WD10EARS and it's bigger brothers is not possible Just Google WD10EARS RAID If you want to do anything fancy with it you are going to need to choose another manufacturer On the other hand if you are looking for a big drive to store your documents pictures music and video library then it's a great choice - just remember to back it up. Dave  |
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