3TB WDC SATA 6.0, 64MB internal drive for $169

jkw

jkw

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Oct 10, 2004
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I found these drives at BestBuy tonight. They are not listed on the website, and the SKU (2927251) doesn't show up on website. On sale for $169.99, which is $60 less than newegg and $40 less than Microcenter OEM version.

Driver Description WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0
Manufacturer Western Digital
Hard Disk Family Caviar Green
Formatted Capacity 3000 GB
Interface SATA-III
Buffer Size 64 MB
 
for $169.99? Stay FAR away. These are Green and thus only useful for data backup...you definitely do NOT want to load an OS or BF3 on these things... Now if these were Caviar BLACKS, I would be all over them.

It's definitely best to wait a few more months until we actually have FAST drives affordable in this category again.
 
Back in May I got 3TB Hitachi 7200rpm drives at $129.00 each, this doesn't seem like a great deal
 
SocceRich20 said:
Back in May I got 3TB Hitachi 7200rpm drives at $129.00 each, this doesn't seem like a great deal
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The Thiland Floods have happend since then. Mid December/January a "Cheap" 3TB Drive was $300.

Thiland Floods knocked out about 40% of the worlds hard disk supply. It's all supply & demand.

Prices are just now slowly starting to come back down
 
I remember reading that june/july prices should start settling for HDD's.
 
hity645 said:
Ya if you don't use it often. My green drives I use for data have scared me away from them.
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What problems exactly have you run into with green drives that make them unsuitable for data storage purposes?
 
Our internal guess is September at the earliest. Late Q4, / Q1 much closer to normal. June / July is unlikely. We've got several thousand machines to build in that time frame and it's looking very doubtful price will be normalized in time for it.
 
Directron said:
Our internal guess is September at the earliest. Late Q4, / Q1 much closer to normal. June / July is unlikely. We've got several thousand machines to build in that time frame and it's looking very doubtful price will be normalized in time for it.
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Thanks for the heads up!
 
Used/refurb drives have become a pretty hot commodity since the flooding. I get calls daily now from people begging for any drive I can scrounge up LOL.
 
Kind of weird; but I went by the local best buy; they had hte external 3tb drive on sale (with sticker on the shelf) for $169; but did not have the internal version (nor could they find it in their system).
-
Amazon reviews suggest these have silent data corruption so I passed until I could dig out some more information.
 
Falkentyne said:
It's definitely best to wait a few more months until we actually have FAST drives affordable in this category again.
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Agreed, I bought 2Tb drives for less than $75.00 a while back....when prices come back to normal, I may buy more....no way I'm paying these prices.
 
Kueller said:
What problems exactly have you run into with green drives that make them unsuitable for data storage purposes?
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Any time I go to access my data I have to wait for the drive to spin up. This is very annoying as I have My Docs mapped to a green drive. So if I hit a game for a little bit and then try to open a word doc I have to wait for the drive to spin up.
 
hity645 said:
Any time I go to access my data I have to wait for the drive to spin up. This is very annoying as I have My Docs mapped to a green drive. So if I hit a game for a little bit and then try to open a word doc I have to wait for the drive to spin up.
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I wouldn't call that an issue with the drive, but an issue with how you decided to use it. Nobody should expect these to be fast.

I've got some RewardZone certificates I don't know what I'm going to do with, but I'm still not sure I'm willing to pay this for this drive.. if it was maybe another $20 or so cheaper.
 
hity645 said:
Any time I go to access my data I have to wait for the drive to spin up. This is very annoying as I have My Docs mapped to a green drive. So if I hit a game for a little bit and then try to open a word doc I have to wait for the drive to spin up.
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Umm... you have the wrong drives for your usage scenarios then. Any frequent data access should be stored on your main drive. This is a power saving/life extending feature.

You can shut off shutting down hard drives feature in Windows Power Management.
 
Tsumi said:
Umm... you have the wrong drives for your usage scenarios then. Any frequent data access should be stored on your main drive. This is a power saving/life extending feature.

You can shut off shutting down hard drives feature in Windows Power Management.
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You can also download from WD the actual spin down control utility which allows you greater flexibility over the spin down cycle.
 
I agree with the above poster.

I hate the green drives even for storage.

Accessing anything on the green drives is slow, and sucks, even if it's for archive, and storage purposes it's just so damn slow. Especially slow after you get used to SSD on your primary system ;)

WD Black for storage from here on out, nicer warranty too.
I can justify the cost for my sanity and warranty :p

I end up using my older WD Raptors for storage, and the access time on them is obviously noticeably faster than the Blacks too. I can't justify the cost / gb ratio for storage for these though when buying new ;)

Others, they may be fine with the greens... me, not so much.
 
Here is two pictures on how to stop your hard drive from going into power saving mode. As I don't like having to wait for my drive to spin up before I can send or move data either. Thanks

Hard Drive Power Saving Option On


Hard Drive Power SAving Option Off
 
hity645 said:
Any time I go to access my data I have to wait for the drive to spin up. This is very annoying as I have My Docs mapped to a green drive. So if I hit a game for a little bit and then try to open a word doc I have to wait for the drive to spin up.
Click to expand...

Tsumi said:
Umm... you have the wrong drives for your usage scenarios then. Any frequent data access should be stored on your main drive. This is a power saving/life extending feature.

You can shut off shutting down hard drives feature in Windows Power Management.
Click to expand...

I've got to agree with Tsumi here, you're trying to use the green drive for a situation it wasn't designed for. When I say "data storage" I mean one step above burning files to optical media and tape backups. I wouldn't use a green drive for data that has to be accessed regularly in my daily computing, but to say green drives have scared you away entirely is doing them a disservice. They're still 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than hunting through stacks of backup DVDs and blurays for the one file you want.


Unfortunately, I don't think windows power settings will keep green drives spinning. At least with WD greens, they will shut themselves down shortly after they're no longer being used without a care for what your windows power settings say. There is a utility called WDidle3 that can edit the head parking schedule of WD greens though, something hity645 might want to look into.
 
Directron said:
Our internal guess is September at the earliest. Late Q4, / Q1 much closer to normal. June / July is unlikely. We've got several thousand machines to build in that time frame and it's looking very doubtful price will be normalized in time for it.
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This is why [H]|F is awesome.

I hope your estimate is about right though - looking to build myself a file server this summer and am going to try to wait as long as possible to buy the drives (except the SSD/one backup drive I've gotta get in there to get things started).
 
12.3.18 four out of five SATA green 2TB have gone bad, two of those i lost over 3TB of data i could not copy to another hd before the copy/cut process slowed to ~ 1KB/s, (vs 10 to 30MB/s) then it could not even access the data (three 2TB and one replacement HD gone bad... four bad, two they will nolonger rma). These were archive hd where i backed up data and possibly accessed once or twice a month, they were NOT in heavy use daily. Checking reviews/warnings of most all other brand large (2 to 3TB) hd report similar issues. Even the ssd warn of a limited lifetime, makes me wana go back to tape or punch cards, but unwilling to rent another house to store punch cards! The us$200 to 300 five yr vs us$100 to 200 two yr hd is shortsighted compared to being able to access your content. They are just not made well.
 
I'm with bug here in the anti green camp. A pair of Western Digital 2tb Greens were my first in warranty western digital drive deaths ever. I picked these up at < $80 each last year before the floods and they both died and had to be rmaed since then.

I been using mostly Western Digital Drives since my P2B-D in 2000 and only had 1 drive death outside of those 2 green which was well out of the old 5 year warranty. Both of these greens died in less then a year. :(

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think spinning up and spinning down is the most wear and tear on hard drives so the greens kill them selves faster by stopping and going?
 
I've never heard such complaints about green drives before. I was under the impression they are universally loved for everything that doesn't require quick access, and I even use one to store my games without problems (load times are still quick once things get cached to RAM).

But with all your comments, now I'm on the fence about picking up this one...
 
So here's a question: Do you lose a lot of HDD life when you turn off the spin-down feature? Or is it purely a power saving thing? Because I've got a few drives that will spin down in my HTPC / server and it is kind of annoying to have to wait 10 seconds for the files to show up.
 
Kirika said:
I'm with bug here in the anti green camp. A pair of Western Digital 2tb Greens were my first in warranty western digital drive deaths ever. I picked these up at < $80 each last year before the floods and they both died and had to be rmaed since then.

I been using mostly Western Digital Drives since my P2B-D in 2000 and only had 1 drive death outside of those 2 green which was well out of the old 5 year warranty. Both of these greens died in less then a year. :(

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think spinning up and spinning down is the most wear and tear on hard drives so the greens kill them selves faster by stopping and going?
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Mmmmm, I miss my P2B-D with dual slot1 Xeons. That board was indestructible but massive. I had the P2B as well after I fried by BH6.
 
Falkentyne said:
for $169.99? Stay FAR away. These are Green and thus only useful for data backup...you definitely do NOT want to load an OS or BF3 on these things... Now if these were Caviar BLACKS, I would be all over them.
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Totally silly. I keep seeing comments like these on lower rpm drives and they are stupid. The difference between these and blacks is small. You want a noticeable difference? Buy a SSD.
 
needmorecarnitine said:
Totally silly. I keep seeing comments like these on lower rpm drives and they are stupid. The difference between these and blacks is small. You want a noticeable difference? Buy a SSD.
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QFT. I use a 2TB WD Green in a USB 3.0 Rosewill enclosure for Bluray rips. copying 10-15GB files @ 80MB/sec. Not as fast as a black, but not that far off either.
 
I had 3 500 GB Green drives in my WHS 1.0 box that ran perfectly for 2 years. I am building a new WHS 2.0 box that will have 4 1.5 TB green drives. If you don't expect to break any speed records, these drives are just fine.
 
MavericK96 said:
So here's a question: Do you lose a lot of HDD life when you turn off the spin-down feature? Or is it purely a power saving thing? Because I've got a few drives that will spin down in my HTPC / server and it is kind of annoying to have to wait 10 seconds for the files to show up.
Click to expand...

It's better to keep disks spinning than to spin them down too often. There are a limited number of spinup cycles before the mechanical parts wear out. It's possible to go over the limit in a relatively short period of time if the disk is not configured to have a sane spindown time for your usage pattern. There are some numbers in the link below. I don't know which green drive he is quoting specs for though.

http://www.sagaforce.com/~sound/wdantiparkd/
 
I don't have any 100% positive/for sure evidence that drives larger than 1TB are more unreliable, but that is what it seems like to me. Overwhelmingly so. The only drives that seemed to not have many issues whether they are 1TB or larger are the Samsung hard drives. I have been staying with 1TB F3's and have been very happy with them. It pissed me off when Samsung sold their Hard Drive line, it still does piss me off actually! It just seems to me that in the rush to have the largest capacity drives, that the manufacturers didn't bother to make sure that the drives were reliable. Who knows though, maybe they designed them that way on purpose so we would have to buy more drives for backup and for redundancy. I just really wish Samsung would have kept their hard drive line.
 
i have 4 samsung F4s that i use daily, and spin down for 8+ hours a day while im at work i love the greens. i get home, access my server over the network, and it takes about 5 seconds for them to spin up and get to work. more than worth it for the power savings. and one of them is reporting errors after almost 2 years, so im gonna back it up and keep going, but the other ones have all been great. and i got them % reliability, use optical media. if youre not fully prepared to lose something on your hdd, then you better have it backed up on dvd, or else on another drive. ALWAYS.
 
We've had so many issues with customers and green drives, that if we get a customer who orders any server related product and a green drive we try and make it a point to call them. We've had a lot of issues where a customer or sales rep got several and tried to RAID -- which will invariably fail in short order. If it's for an external or a backup - - fine but we'll strongly encourage a blue, black or RE drive if going WD for just about anything else. The issue became more critical with the hard drive shortages as the last drives to sell out are of course -- the greens.
 
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I have 16 2Tb WD Greens in my file server that have been in service for like 2 years now without issue... when I first got them 2 died within 48 hours, but after they were RMA'ed I have not had any issues *at all*

also they seem plenty fast enough in a large RAID... but ya, as a main OS drive etc, its not fast, but its not supposed to be

its like complaining about slow 0-60mph times on a city bus... who cares? thats not what its for
 
Directron said:
We've had so many issues with customers and green drives, that if we get a customer who orders any server related product and a green drive we try and make it a point to call them. We've had a lot of issues where a customer or sales rep got several and tried to RAID -- which will invariably fail in short order. If it's for an external or a backup - - fine but we'll strongly encourage a blue, black or RE drive if going WD for just about anything else. The issue became more critical with the hard drive shortages as the last drives to sell out are of course -- the greens.
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thanks for the info
 
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