Thread: HD difference?

  1. #16
    Deprecated Dae's Avatar
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    Black is cool. Green is not.

    No seriously, I didn't want to waste my metaphorical breath. Black all the way.
    Warning: Have doubt in anything I post.

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  2. #17
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by bithub View Post
    I don't think the Green drive spins up and down any more or less than the other WD drives. It saves power mainly by running at a lower rotational speed.
    Running at a lower rotational speed requires it to spin down, just not completely to zero. Any change in rotational velocity is spin up/down. While all drives experience frequent dV, power saving drives generally experience larger changes.

  3. #18
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    Is there any evidence that green is more durable than black? We assumed it to be the case just because it runs cooler, but there are many other factors that will affect a harddrive's lifespan. For example, like abachler pointed out, the variable rotational speed.

    The black even has a longer warranty than green.

    If the green breaks sooner, the increase in environmental cost of mining, manufacturing, transporting, transporting again (to disposal), and disposal may well be a lot more significant compared to the little electricity it saves.

    Environmental concerns aside, at where I live, the 1TB green is about $10 cheaper than the 1TB black. Add $6 to that for the saved electricity. That makes it $16 cheaper. Is it really worth it? It's about 25% slower, has a whopping 15ms access time (vs black's 12ms), and 2 years less warranty.

    My dad uses it for storing movies and pictures, because speed just doesn't matter, and the green used to be quite a bit cheaper than black (perhaps the environmental hype has driven up the price?). For where speed matters, though, I see no point going with a green.

  4. #19
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    I'd say forget the Black & Green and go with a Seagate Barracuda instead.
    "I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008

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  5. #20
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Indeed. That -2 warranty difference kinda spills the beans on the Green. Odd.

    I read lower consumption, less noise, lower vibration and more shock and I just think... reliability. Goes to say how badly I have been following hardware on the past years.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  6. #21
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    I think WD advertised the black as the more durable, actually.
    Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture
    # StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.
    # NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
    The green page only has the second one.

    I'd say forget the Black & Green and go with a Seagate Barracuda instead.
    I used to be a big fan of Seagate, too, but their last batch of desktop harddrives (11th generation) are failing in great numbers, so the situation is a bit muddy now. No one knows if the 12th generation is better, or did they just increment the number to try to get rid of the bad name. I would go with WD for the time being.
    Google
    2 reports on the first 10 hits.

    They say it's a firmware problem, but drives that came back from RMA fail, too...

  7. #22
    Deprecated Dae's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cpjust View Post
    I'd say forget the Black & Green and go with a Seagate Barracuda instead.
    So you can add a failed drive to your collection within 6 months. Five drives in my case. The click of death is strong in this one. Just read up on the 7200.11 noise. You have to be lucky to get one of the good models.
    Warning: Have doubt in anything I post.

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  8. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dae View Post
    So you can add a failed drive to your collection within 6 months. Five drives in my case. The click of death is strong in this one. Just read up on the 7200.11 noise. You have to be lucky to get one of the good models.
    Out of the 5 that I've had, only one died.
    I think most of the problems I've heard were due do bad firmware.
    "I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008

    "the internet is a scary place to be thats why i dont use it much." - billet, 03/17/2010

  9. #24
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    I have a barracuda, and my understanding of the statistical failure problem is that it was caused by people who installed firmware fixes "just to be safe" when they were not having the problem that the fix was intended for, and that the consequence of fixing something that ain't broke was even worse than the original problem.

    So to a significant extent, the stats here are due to user dumbness altho no doubt Seagate could have been more explicit vis, "DO NOT INSTALL THE FIRMWARE FIX UNLESS YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A PROBLEM".

    There is some new technology they are using that was the root cause, which said new technology will become irrelevant if the future is all SSD, sad for seagate I guess. Otherwise the barracuda is "cutting edge", they are faster than WD, and that's how R&D is.

    Anyway I haven't had any problem at all, but the whole "scandal" would sure scare me away from buying. To be honest I've always bought either a WD or seagate drive and I've only once (in decades) had to stop using one, because of bad blocks. I stopped using most of them because of size, of course, but last time I checked I still have WD and seagate drives that are 12-15 years old and work fine when installed.
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  10. #25
    Deprecated Dae's Avatar
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    Ahem, I did not update the firmware on any of my Seagate Barracuda drives. Not only because I trust after 3 drives and sending it back, they would get it right, instead of sending it back with bad firmware. Anyway, at the time there was no special firmware fixes (this was a while ago). I bought them, I put them in my computer, and they died. I was getting paranoid. At the time I thought it was Diskeeper that was thrashing my harddrive, because the noise got worse, started clicking, and it died less than a month later, twice. One was DoA. So I switched to PerfectDisk and it worked fine, my suspicions were confirmed, until it died 5 months later. Then I switched to the newest PerfectDisk and it seemed to have the same effect as Diskeeper, so I switched back to the old one. Either way, after using the black, and drives before that, the newer Barracuda's seem to be very touchy. Maybe this firmware fix issued in January solved all the problems though. I don't know, all this happened before that. I used to be a fan of Seagate... I used to be a fan of Maxtor.. and I never liked WD until now.
    Warning: Have doubt in anything I post.

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  11. #26
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    From what I heard, they would just die randomly after some months of use. No updating firmware.

    Firmware or hardware problem doesn't really matter when there is no known fix and the drive needs to be sent back for RMA, and drives that came back from RMA can die again any time.
    Seagate fixes 7200.11 drives--except when it doesn't | Crave - CNET

    Good thing they are offering free data recovery.

    Is Seagate's current line-up really worth it to take the risk? Are they cheaper/faster than the WD Black?

  12. #27
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    I used WD exclusively way back in the days of the 386/486 and then switched to Maxtor in the Pentium 1,2,3 eras. Since Maxtor is now Seagate and I have never heard anything good about a Seagate I went back to WD.

    I've only had 1 WD completely fail on me in about 20 years. I have no reason to switch to Seagate and probably never will. I have several WD's laying around here right now and I bet they still work every bit as good as the day I bought them.

  13. #28
    Deprecated Dae's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyberfish View Post
    Is Seagate's current line-up really worth it to take the risk? Are they cheaper/faster than the WD Black?
    Worth taking the risk? Yes, if you don't want WD. I keep running into articles saying the WD Black benchmarks are the closest you'll get to Raptor performance with a 7200 RPM drive. Mine are all very fast, very sturdy, and very quiet. Generally they (Seagate) seem to be cheaper, but you can get either brand cheap if you wait for the right sale.
    Warning: Have doubt in anything I post.

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  14. #29
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    WOW! I just got a couple WD 500GB Black drives and ran the HD Tune speed test on them and they blow Seagate Barracuda's right out of the water!
    Here's what I found for the WD 500GB Black:
    Code:
    RAID   | HD Write | Vol Write | Min     | Max     | Average | Access     | Burst Rate | CPU
    Level: | Cache:   | Cache:    | (MB/s): | (MB/s): | (MB/s): | Time (ms): | (MB/s):    | Usage:
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     None  |    No    |     No    |  59.5   |  114.7  |  96.7   |    12.5    |    102.8    |  5.7%
    and this is the Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11:
    Code:
    RAID   | HD Write | Vol Write | Min     | Max     | Average | Access     | Burst Rate | CPU
    Level: | Cache:   | Cache:    | (MB/s): | (MB/s): | (MB/s): | Time (ms): | (MB/s):    | Usage:
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     None  |    No    |     No    |  50.0   |  104.9  |  85.1   |    12.2    |    65.0    |  3.0%
    Anybody want to buy some used Seagate drives?
    "I am probably the laziest programmer on the planet, a fact with which anyone who has ever seen my code will agree." - esbo, 11/15/2008

    "the internet is a scary place to be thats why i dont use it much." - billet, 03/17/2010

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