Critical Design Flaw Found in WD Caviar Green HDDs

[Hawk-NGO]

Why anyone would buy a consumer level drive is beyond me. For only a small increase in price, you get a much better drive (the RE series) that is manufactured to a MUCH higher standard. If you value your data at all, the RE series is an excellent investment, especially for very large drives.

Greens are really cheap.. and some of us are really poor. lol.

[Hawk-NGO]

Back when this was news a couple of years ago, linux was the only problem because it liked to access drives for journaling or something every 5 seconds and the idle time was set to 3 seconds back then. I haven't seen anything in WD Greengate 2011 to make me think it's even as big of a problem now as it was then.

Some Windows apps are affected too (FileZilla e.g.).

[gumballguy]

Thanks don

Net result: I cbf toying with wdidle. For minimal use, my counts are maybe too high (htpc has been turned on maybe for a month nonstop)... but <4000.... who cares.

[RealTelstar]

That sounds about right. "Green" drives are really good for bulk data only... eg. media, not your OS disk. As long as you use them that way they're fantastic... of course it's just about impossible to convey that to the general public.

Yeah... I have six of these drives and only one I had to RMA. Reliability is not bad if u use them for what you should (=media storage).

Any way to make the wdidle utility work in 64bit windows? I dont have a live dos cd i think...

[RejZoR]

Why anyone would buy a consumer level drive is beyond me. For only a small increase in price, you get a much better drive (the RE series) that is manufactured to a MUCH higher standard. If you value your data at all, the RE series is an excellent investment, especially for very large drives.

The other option is getting a RE class drive which is not RE. In WD's case, Caviar Black 2TB is identical drive to the RE4, except it's not tested so rigorously and that it comes with a much lower price tag. So in theory you can expect similar reliability and durability, it's just not proven by the vendor, which adds up the price for RE4. But yeah, if you really value your data you need to go for the server class hardware which is designed for very high workloads in very bad conditions for very long contiguous periods of operation. But that comes with a higher price tag. I was not far from buying a RE4 2TB but then decided for the regular Caviar Black 2TB. I value the data but not that much. For now.

[cx-ray]

Just got some WD30EZRX 3TB Green drives. Good thing I remembered this thread. All idle timers were set to 8 seconds. I used wdidle3_1_05 to disable the timers.

[NEOAethyr]

did you turn the idle timer off or what?

Yep I disabled the counters, if i need to park the heads I could always set windows to do that at a 15min timer or something, which would be more reasonable (I don't use driving idling though).

Greens are really cheap.. and some of us are really poor. lol.

I got them because they were alot cheaper then the blacks, and because they used half the wattage.
If I had money I would buy 2x of those new 500meg/s ssd's and raid them(60gig, $100 each), then perhaps 2 or 4 3tb?(depending on price) greens, if I can run the tler program on them (for raid).

Yeah... I have six of these drives and only one I had to RMA. Reliability is not bad if u use them for what you should (=media storage).

Any way to make the wdidle utility work in 64bit windows? I dont have a live dos cd i think...

No you gotta use dos.
If need be you can use easybcd to create a floppy boot entry for you boot menu and boot dos from there .
It would be plain easier I think to just burn a dvd with dos on it, it's all up to you though.

I used win95 osr2.1 dos, win98 se dos would be fine too.
Winme dos, well, that might be fine too, it's just that in the past I've had a few bad board flashes with winme dos while win95 dos worked fine.

Do you need an iso pre-made for you?, It wouldn't be much trouble for me to make one.

[ziddey]

that's funny. this already happened once in the 80s

[cx-ray]

Checked a 6 month old 2TB Caviar Black yesterday. WDIDLE was set to 12.8 seconds from the factory.

[TurboDiv]

So is this problem fixed ? Or i just get a Hitachi 2TB since its dirt cheap...

[MaxxxRacer]

And this is why I only buy the WD Black drives. No one has a bad word to say about these wonderful drives, and I doubt they ever will.

[Frodin]

The WD blacks are too noisy, draw too much power and are more expensive than other drives, imo. There you go They are simply overkill in most raid configured NASes due to constrictions in other parts.

[STEvil]

my blacks arent noisy?

[Frodin]

It seems like they got better, but over 20 dB for a harddrive is too much for my liking:

ACOUSTICS

WD Caviar Black 2TB

The first generation 1TB Caviar Black was one of the loudest hard drive we've ever tested, measuring >21/25 dBA@1m (idle/seeking) in our anechoic chamber. While nowhere close to current quiet HDD leaders, the new 2TB version is a huge improvement, generating 5 dBA less when idle, and about 3 dBA less when seeking.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1079-page5.html

I wish someone made something like 3300rpm harddrives for pure storage purposes (way overkill for USB 2.0 or most NASes anyway), focused on silence and reliability. All of the drives I have seen that are supposed to focus on reliability are 7200rpm drives, and I bet they are not quiet enough for my liking.

[MadHacker]

well they do have 5400 RPM drives,
These drives have "IntelliPower"

A fine-tuned balance of spin speed,
transfer rate, and caching algorithms
designed to deliver both significant
power savings and solid performance.
Additionally, WD Caviar Green drives
consume less current during startup
allowing lower peak loads on systems
as they are booted.

now what RPM they actualy run at ... not sure

[cx-ray]

So is this problem fixed ? Or i just get a Hitachi 2TB since its dirt cheap...

You can disable the idle timer...not sure about the other problems. One of the 2 week old 3TB WD30EZRX drives I got already needs an RMA. It had a Current Pending Sector Count. After running DLGDiagv519 to analyze/fix the issue, it now has an Offline Uncorrectable Sector. I don't trust the drive now....got some Ultrastar drives coming. Maybe they'll fair better.

[NKrader]

my blacks arent noisy?

mine are def way louder than my greens. and in a bad case they are way louder.. got a pair of 750gb blacks for my parents rig.. put em in the gateway case... sooo loud..

You can disable the idle timer...not sure about the other problems. One of the 2 week old 3TB WD30EZRX drives I got already needs an RMA. It had a Current Pending Sector Count. After running DLGDiagv519 to analyze/fix the issue, it now has an Offline Uncorrectable Sector. I don't trust the drive now....got some Ultrastar drives coming. Maybe they'll fair better.

guarentee you will have problems with all drives.. its not like huge companies like wd just drop the ball for years.. everyone has bad HD's.. so you can hop around as much as you want. but drives will still go bad and bread no matter the name on the box.

thats my 2cents

[cx-ray]

guarentee you will have problems with all drives.. its not like huge companies like wd just drop the ball for years.. everyone has bad HD's.. so you can hop around as much as you want. but drives will still go bad and bread no matter the name on the box.

thats my 2cents

I have nothing against WD in general. Actually, I prefer them. However, I need some 3TB drives for a RAID setup in a NAS. I tried the WD Green drives against the recommendation of the manufacturer. One drive failed and I'm rethinking the issue. Maybe it's smarter not to take the risk of using them for a purposes that the manufacturer doesn't recommend.

WD doesn't currently have 3TB enterprise drives for sale. So, I had to look for an alternative.

[TurboDiv]

WOW !!! I just got a new WD Green 2TB and this thing is blowing away my aging Seagate 7200rpm 16mb cache. The green does a crazy 95 MB/sec average transfer rate compared to 60 MB/sec average for my old 7200rpm Seagate. This WD is impressing me even with a 5000 rpm speed. Good job WD, im glad i got it now. No issue so far, but than again i only own it for about 6 hours...

[Kurz]

Turbo, That comes from the increase of aerial density.
Just imagine they have 7200rpm drives with the same Aerial density.

[RealTelstar]

I'm having problems to use the wdidle program, so i'm planning to replace my 4 GP with a more reliable model (3x 2TB units).

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-6/disques-durs.html

Question #1: are the RE4-GP without this idiot intellipark? It seems not according to WD spec sheet.
Are normal RE-4 is fine to use without a raid controller?
The 2TB caviar black does NOT seem reliable enought to me. And i cannot afford a raid 1 (+controller card) of all units i need.

[cx-ray]

Got a new WD30EZRX from WDC RMA. It looks like a complete redesign. Almost as if they stuck it into a Caviar Black housing.

WD30EZRX Date 03 JUL 2011 weight:735g
WD30EZRX Date 12 APR 2011 weight:639g

The Caviar Black weighs 737g

BTW, WDIDLE was still set to 8 seconds on the new 3TB drive

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