Western Digital Green Drives?

[mulletback]

I had a 750 MB Green that started issuing "bad block" errors after about 3 months of use - diagnostic tool reported too many errors to fix, lots of corrupted files. WD sent a 1 TB Black in exchange. That said, I have another 750 MB Green that hasn't given any trouble.

edit: yeah, that's GB not MB - thanks ilovejedd

[ilovejedd]

I had a 750 MB Green that started issuing "bad block" errors after about 3 months of use - diagnostic tool reported too many errors to fix, lots of corrupted files. WD sent a 1 TB Black in exchange. That said, I have another 750 MB Green that hasn't given any trouble.

Didn't know Western Digital made 750 MB green drives. :p

[mulletback]

Didn't know Western Digital made 750 MB green drives. :p

sigh...yeah, GB, GB, GB, cheezeburger... :o

[tvshowman]

An update . . . I started having stuttering issues. It was random and would usually stop after a couple hickups. If you backed up and started playing the file again it usually wouldn't hickup in the same spot (if at all, again, when it started it was occasional and random).

I bought a green 1.5tb drive in november that does the same thing. I shoud add that the drive was great for a couple weeks and until I suspected around the 700gig mark that it started to get my attention better than money on a street corner.

Read about it here.
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...ight=Green

I bought the green drive only as it was discounted to the same price as my seagate and I thought must be good value.

bad idea and I should have bought my second seagate 1.5tb instead which is flawless

[BigMoose]

That is a very interesting thread. I've recently got a 1.5Tb WD (I think it's a green one) and after installing win7 (on my other drive) and using this one for my recordings etc, my other disk problems of multiple records/playback have gone away, but I get an odd problem when watching recordings where it suddenly goes very stuttery. If I pause/resume the problem goes away and it plays back fine (for a while). However it only seems to happen on recordings made by GBPVR. I've played back 1080p .mkv files and nothing odd happens at all. Which makes me think it's nothing to do with the disk. Although looking at the other thread the explanation of the heads and buffered usage would explain the problem nicely. If only it was consistent regardless of the media being played!

[ga_mueller]

I have a 500GB WD Green formatted with 64K clusters being used as the temp recording directory. Can record two OTA HD shows, while watching a recorded one, with no stuttering issues. It's been in use for a couple of months. I try to defrag regularly (or when I remember). I'd buy one again!

[SLR_65]

Hi Tvshowman,

Your problems sound similar to mine! Mine worked flawlessly for several months, but I never recorded to it - my tuners record to a 750gb Seagate that also has the operating system and programs on it. The 1.5tb WD was just used for avi files.

Like I said, it worked fine for months. I had about 900gb on it and then it would start to randomly stutter. Yeah, pausing and starting or even just backing up seemed to fix it. I was noticing it on the client more as we just put a new tv upstairs where it's at and I've been working a lot so I hadn't had time to watch much downstairs. I was suspecting the client hard drive as it's an old 40gb ide drive. I pulled the client and stuck a popcorn hour in the living room and th eproblem completely disappeared, but as I speculated earlier - I think the pch just buffers more and it buffered enough to get past the problem.

Finally though it started freezing up and if you'd go down to the htpc you'd have a popup from the operating system that said there was an i/o error.

I read about the head parking problems on other drives, but when I checked the smart data of my drive that spec was well inline. I was having an elevated reallocated sector count (or something like that, I'm not near the machine and my notes right now). Those weren't climbing while I was troubleshooting the drive, but if I recall correctly it was like 140 or less was normal and mine was at 199.

I tried different cables, ports, etc. and it kept doing it. (it was attached internally directly to the motherboard).

I was able to get my data off the drive and it's currently winging it's way back to Western Digital, but my confidence is a bit shook.

I'm thinking about an Seagate 1.5tb 7200rpm to replace it. I see they had firmware problems earlier, but it appears they've been fixed now?

Stuff happens, and I was able to recover my files, but it sure was a pain -> I just dind't realize how much stuff I had accumulated!

Anyway, keep an eye on your drive - I'll bet it starts giving you the i/o errors soon too -> I'd suggest pulling the data off of it now!

Misery loves company, thanks for posting!

Steve

[BigMoose]

Is there any way to stop this annoying buffering / stuttering problem? The drive is large, cheap and extremely quiet, but for use on an HTPC is all but useless. I've got it formatted with 64k blocks and haven't had any IO errors off it. It just randomly stutters with a pause/resume fixing for another random amount of time. I can only assume it's something to do with buffer and head idling. I cant see any way of increasing the idle timer so that it doesn't happen so perhaps a stroppy mail to WD is all I can do to get them to admit these drives are of no use for an HTPC (despite them claiming other wise)...? It's bloody annoying though as if this problem could be overcome it would be a perfect drive....

[fla]

I replaced a 500Gb black for a 1TB WD green and was getting occasional disk boot error failures coming out of hibernate to record. Someone online had reported the same problem was solved by choosing the long memory test in the BIOS. The long memory test is annoying if I'm present but the disk error failures coming out of hibernate are gone. Other than that the WD Green works like a charm.

[Dave72]

I wonder if you could have some kind of log file etc write to the drive, thus keeping it 'awake'. That would defeat the green part I guess though..

Maybe use a util to copy some small file over to the hd on a periodic basis ?