I'm looking at buying a hard drive from a local store (Catalogue: http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf In AUD) and I'm torn between the WD Blue 1TB ($70) and the WD Green EZRX SATA 3 1TB ($69)
Now, I have no idea what the 'Blue' and 'green' mean, or what EZRX is and whether I need different ports for a SATA 3 drive. If you would be able to expand my knowledge of hard drives or even suggest something better, it would be greatly appreciated.
The main difference is, the Green series is the less-noise, less-power drive. So it is usually a 5400 rpm drive and thus a bit slower on read and write than the Blue (7200 rpm). Blue is the "standard" series of WD whereas Black is the high performance (consumer) series. So it depends on your needs. If neither power consumption nor noise are issues for you, go with the Blue as it is usually faster although the Green might have more cache. Also Blue is only available with up to 1GB of storage if I recall correctly.
The EZRX part defines how many platters are used and what capacity they have if I recall correctly. You might have to google for it though. This information seems to be of almost no value for the regular consumer.
If you have a recent Motherboard, let's say a series launched after 2010, you should have at least some SATA 3 ports. But it shouldn't make much of a difference with non-SSD.
Additional info: If you are interested, keep reading, if not... well, don't.
SATA 2 has a net transfer rate of about 2.4 GBit/s which translates to about 300MB/s. This is a speed no magnetic drive - that I know of - can achieve. For reference: A 15k SAS drive used in servers has a sustained rate of up to about 180 MB/s so nowhere near the limitation of SATA 2. Since SATA is backwards compatible, you should be good even if you have only SATA 2 ports. SSDs are a different story. Here you are limited by SATA 2 and even by SATA 3 by now. But I digress.
TL;DR: Go with Green for less noise and less power consumption but probably slightly less performance. SATA standard doesn't matter in your case.
So, can I still use a SATA 3 drive with a SATA 2 port?
Yeah, all sata disks will work on all sata ports.
Thanks for that! will probably wo with the Blue then.$1 more expensive but better performance!
Almost!
I had a intel 775slot MB or if it was a amd 939 (had both and can´t remember which had trouble) that only had sata1 ports.
I bought a regular HD and it happened too be a sata2 drive but sata is backward compatible so gave that no thought got the drive plugged it in and not even bios showed up when trying too start.
What the hell tried a few times but nope unplugged the drive and started right up switched sata cable if that was the problem, but no then took a sata cable from an already installed disk but nope again.
So the sata cables was probably not the problem so tried the disk in another computer (that only had sata1 ports that to) and it worked right away started searching around on the drive model and MB model and found that this MB had problem if drives was in sata2 mode.
The solution was to use a jumper on the back off the drive to set it to sata1 and then it worked for years.
Nowadays this probably is not an issue but all sata disk works on all sata ports is not 100% true only 99%.