WD Greens For Storage, What For Everything Else?

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St0ry

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Oct 20, 2006
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I'm planning to upgrade my computer, have a quick question about HDD setup. Right now I have a WD 640GB and two 2TB Greens. The 640GB has my OS and is where downloaded files go, whatever I keep is then moved to the Greens.

I plan on getting a SSD for my OS and adding some more drives for storage. My question is, should I keep the 640GB drive as a "download" drive? My main worry is that I do a lot of unraring and if I do it on a larger drive it will cause stress on the hdd, or is that concern unfounded? Also the Greens are 5400rpm, would unraring be quicker on a 7200rpm?

Thanks
 
Unraring on a 7200RPM drive would definitely be faster, however the lower power consumption and heat could be worth you sacrificing the speed.
 
A new green will be faster than an older 7200rpm drive for your usage (sequential).

As for stress, I wouldn't worry about it, as long as you have backups that is.
 
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Your "stressing" the SSD is unfounded.

I don't think I've heard of any case of desktop users "wearing out" their SSD. I've got several SSD's (C300 crucials, even) that have terabytes of writes to it that still show to be fully "healthy" as far as SMART information is concerned.

The 7200RPM may be faster for unraring, and probably faster for loading programs and the like. Sometimes living on a smaller SSD is tough so you could offload some programs and other tasks to it.
 
As per the above poster, I wouldn't worry at all about "stressing" a drive, whether normal discs of spinning rust or SSDs. The size of the drive in general has nothing specific to do with its durability/reliability.

As to Greens, I don't like them, as per a poster above. At all. I've had two examples go bad with reallocated sectors and unexpected high "raw read error rates" (as per S.M.A.R.T.) within the warranty periods. No other hard drive of any make I've owned (or used) over the past twenty five years has flaked out like that within the warranty period.

If you want to stick with Western Digital for data storage drives (at an affordable price), I'd recommend Reds instead. They have one million hour MTBFs (which is currently rare for consumer drives), a longer warranty (3 years vs. 2 year for Greens), are rated for 24/7 use (unlike Greens, Blues, Blacks & Raptors) and don't have the built-in irritating 8-second "Intellipark" spindle stoppage feature that Greens used to have (and might still have).

Reds don't cost much more than Greens either. They also have slower spindle speeds than 7200rpm like Greens do, so they use less power and are far cooler than (say) Blacks.

As to your 640GB drive (what model is it?), yes, no problem re-purposing that for storage. If you want ultimate un-RAR speed, SSDs are the ticket, of course. For spinning rust data storage, 7200rpm Blacks (and 7200rpm REs & 10Krpm Raptors) are the choice. A Black model with 4TB size was just recently released; earlier, you could only get over 3TB with an expensive RE drive. But with Blacks & REs, you'll trade off that speed with higher drive temperatures and higher power usage. So I prefer Reds for data storage; YMMV.

EDIT: I was didn't remember the details properly when stating Greens had 1 year warranties (I edited the above paragraphs). They did go down to 2 years from their former 3, however. And it sure seemed like just a year when I had two examples become defective within a couple months of moderate usage (as noted above)...heh.
 
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Do whatever you want.

There's no "stressing" and if the 1/2 second difference between a 7200&5400 drive is a problem for you, I'd suggest you have a different set of problems. :D

Seriously, no matter how you configure the drives it's not going to hurt anything. :)
 
Here is what I do.

SSD for OS/installed programs like Office, Chrome, Winamp, VM stuff etcetc
1TB for bulk storage, portable Apps, where files get downloaded to (from web browsers), Drivers, Junk (the misc folder), Programs (installers for programs, shared), a "Share" folder for read/write to my comp, Temp (where temporary stuff goes, such as jdownloader, bittorrent, etc), VMs, local Music, "My Documents", Pictures etc.
500GB drive for where I have games INSTALLED TO, such as Steam, ANNO, GW...etc.


The reason for separating the "Games" drive from "storage" is if/when I'm playing a game, I really REALLY get irritated when something decides to access the storage drive and cause fps lag spikes in my games if I had it installed to the storage drive. So separating them does good. I used to use a 250x2gb raid0 for games but one drive finally died, yes I have an active backup of all single drives listed (everything!)


Also, WD Greens suck, just pay attention to SMART and if you start to get read/write errors then start backing up.
 
extide said:
Get a raptor, only of the latest gen ones, 250/500/1000GB.
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That's what I plan on doing. I don't need >10TB data for my home, so I'm just getting 8 1tb Velociraptors, putting them in Raid 6 and call it a day.
 
I've been buying WD Green since the first one came out (that 1TB is still in use) and they're no less reliable than other drives. I buy several HDD per month and had to RMA a couple of WD greens, but also many Seagate 7200.11, one Samsung F4, several Seagate LP, a couple of Hitachis (and I only own a couple)...

The main reason WD Green have a bad reputation here is because they're not made for RAID use, but if you don't care about that they're fine, and easy on the ears and power bill.

Also, they never had 1 year warranty, it's Seagate that did this for 6 months (during which I only bought WD and Samsung), they have 2 years.
 
I have a Qnap 6 bay NAS, it ran fine for over a year with 6x1.5TB WD Greens, then I replaced those with 6x2TB WD Greens and it ran fine again for over a year, all those WD 1.5 and 2TB drives are now in a box with 2 Dell Perc 5i raid controllers, still running fine, not one has died or given me problems. I am I lucky? Maybe, but I stand by the WD Green drives, they have given me nothing but service. That being said, I am now using WD Red drives as I prefer the features and 3yr warranty.
 
I have a Qnap 6 bay NAS, it ran fine for over a year with 6x1.5TB WD Greens, then I replaced those with 6x2TB WD Greens and it ran fine again for over a year, all those WD 1.5 and 2TB drives are now in a box with 2 Dell Perc 5i raid controllers, still running fine,
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I'm surprised!

Did you change any of the Green drives settings? It's that head parking-spin down routine that makes these unsuitable for RAID situations.

Any tricks to get around it?
 
I did nothing special, just popped the drives in, setup RAID 5 and that was it, updated the firmware as time went on, never had problem. By firmware I mean the Qnap firmware, nothing to do with the drives.
 
You are lucky then. I've had 11 2TB greens fail in 2 ~ 3 years. Temp controlled, no vibrations out of the norm...case in a low humidity area, nothing abnormal, just shit luck.
 
Could be that there was also a huge variance in manufacturing, maybe mine were part of an earlier or later batch, who knows.
 
ashman said:
I did nothing special, just popped the drives in, setup RAID 5 and that was it, updated the firmware as time went on, never had problem.
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Pretty good.

There must be some "trick" and I'm not aware of it. :)
 
Thanks for the replies, looks like I don't have much to worry about.

Regarding reliability of greens, it's not a huge deal for me since nothing on it is irreplaceable, the important stuff is all backed up. Although it seems like the price of reds have gone down a bit so might just go with reds.
 
I think reds are just greens with time limited error recovery enabled so they don't get dropped from raid arrays. If that is the case then they are still sketchy like the greens
 
Online retailers say WD greens have a few percents return rate, like other drives. There is no proof that they're "sketchy". We're not talking about OCZ with their tactics of changing the internals without warning. In fact it's Seagate now doing this, with 2TB 7200.14 drives shipping with 3 platters while the manufacturer made a big deal about 7200.14 being a 1TB/platter series.
 
bAMtan2 said:
I think reds are just greens with time limited error recovery enabled so they don't get dropped from raid arrays. If that is the case then they are still sketchy like the greens
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You might think that looking at the specifications. But the Reds apparently use a different spindle mounting system (as in "3D mechanical balancing technology for vibration reduction"), firmware that, besides enabling TLER as you say, allows "support for the ATA Streaming Command Set" (better for AV operations) and so on. Along with the longer warranty, quoted guaranteed 24/7 & 1 mil. hour MTBF operation and so on.

Aesma said:
Online retailers say WD greens have a few percents return rate, like other drives. There is no proof that they're "sketchy".
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Online retailers, not exactly the most reliable source of failure info for products they sell ;). As well, you would assume most defective drives get sent back to WD rather than online retailers.
 
Aesma said:
They sell all brands so I don't see why they would skew the numbers, in fact they have been doing this for years so each manufacturer has had up and downs.

It's possible Hitachi's numbers are misleading since there is no way to RMA directly with them.
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Giving the benefit of the doubt that this "article" wasn't influenced by standing relationships with vendors and suppliers they have (which is a phenomenon pretty much unavoidable in the sales business - some relationships will always stronger than others) there are still a dozen reasons this is anything but an impartial scientific study.

Too vague in specifying what qualifies as a "return", too vague in sample sizes that make up each alleged failure rate percentage -- just a vague blanket statement about all categories "The statistics by brand are based on a minimum sample of 500 sales and those by model on a minimum sample of 100 sales, with the biggest volumes reaching tens of thousands of parts by brand and thousands of parts by model."

So essentially they're saying some of the stats may be based on only a few hundred sales, and some may be in the thousands, but "just take our word for it that these stats are statistically meaningful". And if the harddisk group happens to be one with only a few hundred sampled then thats laughably insignificant when factoring batches off the assembly line can be in quantities of 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 100,000.
 
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St0ry said:
*SNIP*My main worry is that I do a lot of unraring*SNIP Thanks
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If it's videos that you are unraring, VLC can play the video directly from inside the RAR. No need to uncompress. Just a thought.
 
hotcrandel said:
Your "stressing" the SSD is unfounded.

I don't think I've heard of any case of desktop users "wearing out" their SSD. I've got several SSD's (C300 crucials, even) that have terabytes of writes to it that still show to be fully "healthy" as far as SMART information is concerned.
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Same here, my OCZ Agility 1 has been running since 2010 across multiple systems with heavy heavy usage, and hasn't burned out yet.

If speed is needed, then +1 to the SSD.
If speed+storage is needed, then I would have to recommend one of the newer VelociRaptors.
 
Rune75 said:
If it's videos that you are unraring, VLC can play the video directly from inside the RAR. No need to uncompress. Just a thought.
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Unfortunately, its not quite as cool as that. In order to play such a video, view a document, view a photo or open any other file directly out of a single or multivolume compressed file (RAR, ZIP or anything else) using a third-party program, the file still needs to be extracted beforehand.

When you access the file directly out of the compressed file using a third party program (such as 7-Zip, WinRAR or otherwise), its normally automatically extracted to your TEMP folder (or other folder you set up in the compression program options). After that has been done, the file is then opened by VLC or whatever else you used. Close the compressed file and the extracted file(s) is normally automatically deleted out of TEMP (or wherever it was auto-extracted to).
 
valve1138 said:
With the WD Greens, turn off the auto head-parking and you'll be fine.
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I'd love to be wrong, but I could have sworn that WD disabled the ability to do that over the last year or so. If true, maybe you had a 3rd-party util in mind?
 
Fritingo said:
Unfortunately, its not quite as cool as that. In order to play such a video, view a document, view a photo or open any other file directly out of a single or multivolume compressed file (RAR, ZIP or anything else) using a third-party program, the file still needs to be extracted beforehand.

When you access the file directly out of the compressed file using a third party program (such as 7-Zip, WinRAR or otherwise), its normally automatically extracted to your TEMP folder (or other folder you set up in the compression program options). After that has been done, the file is then opened by VLC or whatever else you used. Close the compressed file and the extracted file(s) is normally automatically deleted out of TEMP (or wherever it was auto-extracted to).
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I'm scratching my head here. This a really long and confident reply for somebody to be so wrong about.

There are video players that play directly from archived videos. Vlc has recently become one of them
 
bAMtan2 said:
I'm scratching my head here. This a really long and confident reply for somebody to be so wrong about.

There are video players that play directly from archived videos. Vlc has recently become one of them
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I'm scratching my head here. This is a really short and mean reply for something the poster could otherwise be more civilized about :eek:.

Twenty years of experience fooling around with (and testing) compression programs, that's how they (ones that have allowed opening files from within them) have always worked in Windows. You claim, though, that recently VLC has changed to get around the need for decompression first. OK, that's very cool if its the case. I normally use Media Player Classic-Home Cinema, but have given VLC a test.

Current (Windows) VLC version 2.0.4. On the system drive, did a disk state snapshot compare with Regshot 1.8.3b5. "Compressed" (compressed video doesn't really compress much or at all further) a 65MB AVI video file (Xvid video codec) with 7-Zip 9.25 alpha in the ZIP format using the "Normal" compression level (no tweaks to other settings) on the system drive. In 7-Zip, by default the "working folder" is the "System temp folder" and checkmarked "Use for removable drives only".

Changed AVIs to open with VLC by default. Opened the ZIP file so that it was now showing in 7-Zip's File Manager. Rightclicked the AVI, chose "Open".

Sure enough, 7-Zip put up a temporary window showing "Copying..." with a timer bar for a couple of seconds. Meaning it was extracting the file....to somewhere. After it did so, the video opened up and played without issue in VLC. Then closed the video and the File Manager.

Did a second state record with Regshot, then compared. Sure enough, no evidence of the extracted AVI file on the system.

Next test, did a Regshot state record as I did the first time. This time, however, after opening the video within the ZIP file, I left the video up in VLC as well as leaving File Manager open. Did a second state run and another compare. Yep, no evidence the file was extracted anywhere.

Then checked Task Manager; VLC had a working memory set of 48MB and a commit size of 77MB. Closed 7-Zip and VLC/the video, reopened VLC on its own (no video). VLC's working memory set went down 19MB and its commit size was only 9MB. So looks like 7-Zip extracts a video "into VLC's used memory". If I didn't see the "Copying..." window in 7-zip when opening the video, though, would start to believe it played directly out of the ZIP.

But yes, I was incorrect about it extracting videos with VLC into the system temp directory before opening. My memory is filled with left-over, empty WinZIP, WinRAR & 7-Zip folders clogging up my TEMP folder over the years...lol.

But will need more convincing that videos "play directly" out of compressed files rather than being extracted first (to VLC's used memory or otherwise). When something is compressed with a no-loss compression utility, it has historically always needed to be uncompressed (whether to a program's memory, your hard drive, etc.) before you can view it in its original state.
 
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Fritingo said:
I'm scratching my head here.
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Unfortunately, you are not doing what I said. With my multi-gig MKV files, there are many RAR files (.rar, .r01, .r02 etc). I assiciated .rar to open with VLC. You can also just turn on VLC and File ==> Open ==> movie.rar

Of course opening the compression program of your choice and then opening the file from INSIDE the compression program will uncompress it then play.
 
jon-popcorn.gif
 
^^ :D

Rune75 said:
Unfortunately, you are not doing what I said. With my multi-gig MKV files, there are many RAR files (.rar, .r01, .r02 etc). I assiciated .rar to open with VLC. You can also just turn on VLC and File ==> Open ==> movie.rar
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Ah very cool. Never considered that VLC would have its own decompressor for non-video formats like RAR or ZIP (MPC-HC doesn't). Certainly saves time/effort if you have videos stored like that.
 
Yeah ended up getting a 3TB red yesterday, only marginally more expensive than greens
 
I use a Black drive for my boot drive and a blue drive for games.

Seems to work just fine for me.
 
No mention of WD Enterprise drives?

Fast, 5yr warranty, 24x7 reliability

They are expensive, but worth it in the long run if you seem to keep getting hard drives that die after a couple of years.

4TB - WD4000FYYZ
3TB - WD3000FYYZ
2TB - WD2000FYYZ

I bought a couple greens a little over 2YRS ago and one is completely dead. I don't expect the other one to last past a year based on the SMART status.
 
I have had Seagates and WD Greens give failure signals in my WHS 2011 Server.
The WD Green 2TB vs.3TB show higher temps than some diagnostic progrm like, maybe since they (all) don't spin down so often.
 
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