WD Caviar Black vs Green vs Blue

The black roasts that green drive. You can check all specs on xbitlabs
 
The greens are certainly affordable, but watch out for the WDEADSs - they seem to have quite a high failure rate after they hit 10,000 hours or so. Fortunately, they're not being made anymore!
 
unwire said:
The greens are certainly affordable, but watch out for the WDEADSs - they seem to have quite a high failure rate after they hit 10,000 hours or so. Fortunately, they're not being made anymore!
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I'm pretty sure the high load cycle count caused by the default 8 second park delay may have contributed to a lot of that. Use the WDIDLE utility to change the delay to 300 seconds or the likes.
 
Agreed - which is why I disabled Intellipark on all of my drives.

Well, most of them allowed me to completely disable it, but some of them reported 300ms when I attempted to disable it. Whether it actually *was* disabled at this point or not I'm not sure.

Then there's the question of which is worse for the drive: constant load cycles, or never spinning down at all? :)
 
unwire said:
Agreed - which is why I disabled Intellipark on all of my drives.

Well, most of them allowed me to completely disable it, but some of them reported 300ms when I attempted to disable it. Whether it actually *was* disabled at this point or not I'm not sure.

Then there's the question of which is worse for the drive: constant load cycles, or never spinning down at all? :)
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I believe that since they are mechanical, HDDs suffer the most from being powered on/off frequently rather than spinning constantly.
 
That's my suspicion as well.

So having said that, do you think its not a good idea to have the controller spin down all array drives after a certain idle period of say, 3 hours? There certainly a power saving here (at least 100W with a full case) but if it increases the likelihood of drive failures its not worth the headache..
 
I think spinning down after a few hours is fine but 20 minutes or less would be destructive for desktop drives. I believe laptop drives are designed to spin up and down frequently.
 
I for one would make sure the drives are always spinning, unless the power bill really is an issue.

Maybe I'm wrong, but from my personal experience drives running 24/7 last far longer than ones that are powered on and off every day. (this holds true for other parts such as the power supplies)
Perhaps other people have had the opposite experience, but I've decided to stick to this rule ever since I got an UPS (power failures are quite common around here, and that can't be harmless)

Edit : as the above poster said, laptop drives must be designed to spin up and down frequently since I've very rarely seen them fail.
 
Yeah I tend to agree. This reminds me one of the first IT-related jobs I had 10-12 years ago or so - the servers in the lab had not been shut down over 5 years, but they company was moving to another location. The concern wasn't the downtime during the movement of the systems, but that they would not start up again if they were turned off! And they were right - after moving them to the new location and booting them up, one of the power supplies had failed. Minor, replaceable issue, fortunately..

To paraphrase Newton's First Law: Hard drive platters in motion tend to stay in motion.

Or.. something like that.. ;)
 
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