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I'm looking into buying a 1 TB hard drive and I'm interested in the WD Caviar Green and Black. What are the main advantages/disadvantages of these? I can get the Green for $160AUD and the Black for $170AUD. Good deal or a big rip off? I'm not really looking for performance, more just reliability.
Cheers.
Green has some type of negligible power saving feature or something like it. Just get the Black and forget the green. It's WD's attempt at going green and a sad one at that. Why would I care about a few watts here and there when I'm pushing 1000 watts? Not like I'm ever going to see any benefit in my power bill b/c of a green drive.
Then the disclaimer:Quote:
Helps enable eco-friendly PCs - WD Caviar Green drives yield an average drive power savings of 4-5 watts over standard desktop drives making it possible for our energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. This power savings equates to reducing CO2 emission by up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year - the equivalent of taking a car off the road for 3 days each year*. By using environmentally-conscious PCs with our WD Caviar Green drives on board, large organizations with many desktop computers can minimize their carbon footprint and save real money on electricity costs.
From this site:Quote:
*Assumes that a car produces 1.60 CO2 pounds per Kwatt/hours/year. Calculation of automobile emissions depends on the car's g/km emission levels and km/year of driving.
WD Caviar Green 1 TB SATA Hard Drives ( WD10EACS )
Sounds good but I bet somehow it doesn't exactly save as much as they claim. But it's all up to you. If you think we are all doomed b/c of our current carbon emissions and really think buying eco-friendly hard drives is going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things then that is completely your decision. They spin it well enough to almost believe it. But then again I just have to make a few more runs to Best Buy or to the grocery store per year and your little hard drive's contribution to the environment has been completely negated.
Here's an idea for WD. Stop trying to swindle people into buying a hard-drive that just as well could be manufactured as the Black one yet also have the power savings and features of the Green one. I mean wouldn't someone who really 'cared' for the environment embed that type of technology into their mainline products instead of marketing them as some overpriced overhyped separate line?
That's the Green. With the added benefit of more storage space (up to 2GB) and lower consumption (6 & 3 watts against 8 and 7 watts). An excellent hard drive.Quote:
Originally Posted by yaya
The price seems high though. I'm looking into buying one myself and have seen them in the 80s to 100.
EDIT: Bubba makes some interesting points. My reasoning is concerned only with the electric bill, not the so-called green planet. In any case the difference is indeed negligible even concerning electricity costs. But every bit counts I guess. This come from someone who only buys <20 watt light bulbs.
A two packs of cigarettes daily that more than offsets all of the little bits that count. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Mario F.
Well, I still didn't find a light bulb I could smoke yet :D
According to this website, How much does electricity cost? What is a kilowatt-hour? (kWh), the average cost of electricity for US residence is 12c/kWh. That is 12/1000=0.012c/Wh. Assuming your computer is on 12hr a day, and the harddrive spends negligible time active. The difference in idle power draw is 7.8-3.7=4.1W. Difference in power draw per day would be 4.1W*12hr=49.2Wh. If you run the harddrive for 3 years, that would be 3*365.24*49.2=53909Wh, which will cost you $6.47 (that's how much the green will save over black, over 3 years of running 12hr/day 365.24days/year).
If you do a lot of I/O, though, things can be very different. Even though the green eats less power active, it will need to spend more time in active mode, since they are slower. Green may end up not saving any power at all.
I have a black and it's pretty fast (close to 100MB/s). Still nowhere near my SSD, though... :D.
Kind of like those "low flow" toilets. How do they save water if you need to flush them about 2-3 times to flush everything? :DQuote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
Well, just abide by this motto "If it saves the environment something, it costs you something" :D
You need to stop thinking in lines of "if I do this, then I save this," and more like "if I and others do this, we can save a lot."
Sure, 4W can seem insignificant. But when 10 000 people save 4W, you get 40 000 W of total savings. And a lot of people tend to leave the computers on, while they really shouldn't.
So one should do a favor and go green as a role model for everyone else. But don't feel pressured to really go green if it costs too much.
Ah, thanks for the replies.
My aim isn't to aid the environment, I just want a decent HD that won't die on me in the next year or so. But it looks like I'm leaning towards the black.
Thanks.
Also keep in mind that since the green hard drive uses less power, it also runs cooler. This will aid the drive's longevity. It your main concern is reliability, then I would go for the Green over the Black.
If you want to look for a good deal for a HDD, check out this website. Multiple times a week they post good deals on drives. They actually have a green one on the front page right now:
Slickdeals.net - The best coupons, lowest prices, and hottest deals.
That's not necessarily the way it works. A drive that is constantly spinning up and down will wear the bearings out faster than one that stays running 24/7.Quote:
Originally Posted by bithub
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. The specifications on their website don't even give an average latency time, so it's probably not a good selling point for them.Quote:
Originally Posted by abachler
Black has a 5 year warranty, Green is only 3 years.
Black is cool. Green is not.
No seriously, I didn't want to waste my metaphorical breath. Black all the way.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by bithub
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.
I'd say forget the Black & Green and go with a Seagate Barracuda instead. ;)
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.
I think WD advertised the black as the more durable, actually.
The green page only has the second one.Quote:
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.
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.Quote:
I'd say forget the Black & Green and go with a Seagate Barracuda instead.
2 reports on the first 10 hits.
They say it's a firmware problem, but drives that came back from RMA fail, too...
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by cpjust
Out of the 5 that I've had, only one died.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dae
I think most of the problems I've heard were due do bad firmware.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
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:
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 | 59.5 | 114.7 | 96.7 | 12.5 | 102.8 | 5.7%
Anybody want to buy some used Seagate drives? ;)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%