• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

western digital green drives

S

silverwolf0

Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2004
Messages
613
I have a five year old rig with a 640GB WD Black and a 2TB Samsung drive and neither have given me a problem in the last five years. I've moved over to an SSD and have them mainly as secondary drives now for movies and such. How many more years do you expect them to last? I've always been a light user, aside from the occasional encoding and gaming, which is now SSD driven.

I also wanted another drive and am debating what to get. It's not super important and won't be used as a main drive or need any sort of speed. But I'd rather it last for a very long time, at least 5+ years, like my two other drives. The WD Green 3TB is $100 around now. Maybe I've been reading too many bad reviews and its clouded my judgment, but I am a bit wary of modern hard drives and their reliability compared to half a decade ago. Will the WD Green be just as good as my two other drives as far as longevity? The power frugal-ness the green drives are known for concerns me as I don't know if all the head parking can reduce lifespan or make it more prone to failure. My Samsung drive actually does that a lot though, or something similar, since it has to spin up if I access it maybe once a day. Yeah I only access these hard drives a few times a day for media files since the SSD does all the heavy lifting and I plan to use the WD Green in the same fashion. I also have a 1TB Seagate external that I've been using off and on. It turns off like crazy and clicks each time it turns off, but the drive has zero issues still.
 
How many more years do you expect them to last?
Click to expand...

My expectation is it is unpredictable. Could be 1 day could be 5 years.

I've always been a light user,
Click to expand...

I am not sure how much that factors into the equation. I mean drives come DOA, other drives last a few weeks then there are drives in raid servers that work for 10 years. Although overall after 5 years the expectation is the failure rate will sharply increase on average.
 
Modern HDDs aren't any better or worse than previous generation HDDs. About the only thing I'd think MIGHT increase failure rate is HDDs with large numbers of platters just due to the fact that there's more chances of failure.

Most drives that die generally die early from what I've seen, or generally atleast in warranty range (for me). Only drive I've had fail was a WD 1.5TB black, but it was so easy to RMA it wasn't a huge deal as it was just a program drive.

Most of HDD survival or death is due to shipping imo. Most major suppliers seem to get smarter in this regard, as the recent HDDs I've gotten have been held in thick cardboard boxes and suspended by thick black plastic holders, providing a lot of protection. Not always 100% the case, I got a HDD from amazon about 2 years ago that was just loose inside the box, I didn't even bother to try to use it, just sent it back.

I still have an old 2TB WD green from ~2008 or so that's in perfect working order, but experiences differ and 1 is a very small sample size :p
 
Reliability is variable and can vary by a multitude of factors. You could have a WD Green drive last 10 years, or you could get a bad one that lasts 2 months. It may or may not matter if its barely used or not.

If you are that concerned about reliability you need to be focusing on warranty, MTBF, and simply paying for a more expensive drive to lower chances of getting a bad drive or at the very least be able to replace that drive if it does go bad. Bare WD green drives without retail packaging have a warranty of 2 years. If purchased in the retail box, the warranty is 3 years.
http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

If you want a drive to last 5 years, you best get a drive with a warranty to match. For Western Digital, that would be the Black series and RE series. Coincidentally, these also tend to be the more reliable drives anyways if you look at the anecdotal evidence such as customer reviews. I'm sure the overall reliability numbers are much higher across all of their product line, but if you are concerned at least buy piece of mind with the better warrantied products.
 
My Maxtor 40GB drive was obtained in 2006 and its still running until today....only reason I took it out yesterday was because I got a larger 1TB drive. So yeah, age doesn't really matter in HDD performance :D
 
WD is really pushing tiered drives (hence the colors). You pay more, you get more performance and a better warranty.

That in mind, the primary issue with Green drives is the head parking, which really takes a toll on the drives. I've bought three green drives over the past few years and the first thing I did was disable head parking with wdidle and set Windows power to never power off. All three are still going strong without issues with only a few thousand head parks in 3 years.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top