I have a quick question about the WD Green drives.
The power-save mode seems like a great idea at first but I heard these drives experience a lot of failure if in constant use.
Could anyone, please, clear me up on that?
And if it has those issues what HDD would you recommend?
Western Digital Green drives are good for slower less accessed storage. They can have issues with the spin down or "Intellipark" that may cause excessive wear but most of those issues have been tuned out in the newer versions.
I buy into the reliability of Western Digital and have a FreeNas box running 10 red drives and a 3tb green as a scratch disk for torrents
If you want a place to just dump files that will spin down when your not accessing there nice drives, they can take a lot of abuse and I haven't really killed any.
I cant speak as well about their external enclosures that use WD greens, the enclosures die all the time and the disk inside is still fine
Green drives are not meant to be anything other than occasionally accessed storage. Not as a main drive. They will die horribly if they are used that way.
I second this WD drives are reliable and will take a beating and give warning before they die. The Green version is really made for lite usage where the drive can turn itself off if it is not being accessed. Greens are best for auxiliary hard drives light usage drives, or low power drives. If used in Raid, NAS, or server applications these drives have a poor track record just as you heard. not sure what you want to do with a WD Green but they do sell a heavy duty version of this drive the RE4-GP it costs more, but, is a industrial drive with the power saving features of a WD green combined with the reliablity and throuput of a RE4. Basicly a faster WD green without the risk of premature death
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I have a 2TB WD Green drive that i've been using as my main drive for 2 years now, I haven't had any issues at all. I primarily game on my machine and do some light tasks, like browsing and now some minor coding. it's good enough for what i do.
Thank you for your answers everyone.
I'll opt for a WD Black combined with an ssd now.
A friend I worked with used WD Greens in his NAS and slow each one died - they are not designed for heavy use at all.
WD Greens should never be used in a NAS or as a system drive.
run WDIDLE utility on your green to lower the load cycles... I have 10 drives and I love them. Used purely for storage and archiving.
I've been using my WD Green for 2 years now as a secondary drive for pictures, and programs that don't benefit from an ssd like fraps, CPU-Z, and light games (as far as load times are concerned) like Metro Last Light, The Forrest etc. It's still a very healthy drive but I shall be replacing most of its purpose with a 1tb ssd within a year and be using it only for a few programs and pictures after that. I however do not suggest using the drive quite as much as I do so get something else.
Get a Blue. I have a 2Tb Blue. It's great value. Also, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWD0g43ZoEk
There's no need to pay more for Black.
Just get a Blue. The black isn't worth the $20 premium