WD Caviar Green 2Tb

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Rossi~

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Any known issues with the WD Caviar Green drives you guys know about? Going to purchase a 2Tb drive soon a long with an external dock, just for backup. As far as i know they're pretty damn reliable, which is all i will care about really.
 
EADS drives are 512b blocks and are fine for anything. EARS drives are 4k blocks and may need to have special steps taken if you use them in raid. Just using them in a dock you should be fine. What OS are you using them with? If you are using XP I would recommend the EADS drives to avoid alignment issues on the EARS drives.
 
Cheers for the feedback. I am running W7 64bit, no raid, just standalone to backup my 2 x 1Tb Caviar Black RAID-0 setup.
 
Also the new EARS drives are 3 platter and should be faster and more reliable than the previous 4 platter design. For a backup drive you shouldn't have any issues.
 
Rossi~ said:
Any known issues with the WD Caviar Green drives you guys know about? Going to purchase a 2Tb drive soon a long with an external dock, just for backup. As far as i know they're pretty damn reliable, which is all i will care about really.
Click to expand...

I have been staying far away from the WD Green drives. I haven't had one that hasn't failed after a few months to a year. Especially anything over 1TB. My advice is go for the Caviar Blacks before the greens.
 
I have had 6 of these for the last 2 years, I had one crash after 8 months of constant use in a RAID5 array (RMA was a breeze with WD). You can in fact turn on TLER and turn off the WDIDLE. I've had no problems whatsoever with the ones in JBOD config. The read/writes are about the same as the 1tb blacks until you start filling up the disks. The WD20EARS have a bigger cache and the 4K sector size, and improved speed over the EADS however the difference was not enough to overcome the extra steps to get the drive to work in any advanced setup. For your use I wouldn't rule out EARS entirely. After I benchmarked the drive I decided to return mine for an EADS.

If your interested in the reported error rates, here's a quote from a very good article Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019:
"With one exception: Western Digital’s Caviar Green, model WD20EADS, is spec’d at 10^15, unlike Seagate’s 2 TB ST32000542AS or Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K2000 (pdf)."
 
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Apollo686 said:
Also the new EARS drives are 3 platter and should be faster and more reliable than the previous 4 platter design. For a backup drive you shouldn't have any issues.
Click to expand...

Cool, the 2Tb WD Caviar Green is an EARS drive apparently -- http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-327-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279

I'm not going to be using this all the time, in fact it'll be powered up for backup about once a month, that's it. Been looking around and there are loads of people using this drive so i might go for it. Unless you guys can suggest one of the alternative 2Tb drives from here (budget is £100 max) -- http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=1279&sortby=priceAsc
 
I've been using the 3 of the 1TB models for a little over a year now in a raid 5 array and haven't had a problem yet. *knocks on wood* I have another 2 TB sitting beneath them for 4 or 5 months now and no issues either.

For what it's worth...
 
You boot to a flash drive as a 98 boot disk containing wdidle3. Then run the command to set the head parking time.
 
Also to add to this and not create another thread:

I'm looking to create a script to backup from my main data RAID to the external drive to basically backup it all incrementally/new, modified and delete from backup those that have been deleted on the RAID; a Clone if you will.
I have used XXCOPY a lot to backup/copy/clone in the past but i want a script to run and just let it do it's stuff overnight at a click of a button, maybe using XXCOPY and save as a .bat i was thinking?

Could anyone point me in the right direction? TIA
 
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