WD Caviar Green (2TB) a good choice?

[Atrus]

Hi -

Just curious to know if the WD Caviar Green drive is a good choice for a HTPC.

I record to an older standard drive, but for this one I was hoping to store all my media - rip my DVD's to it, put music and pics on it. I'd be playing movies off of it through the HTPC, but wouldn't be using it for the actual PVR duty.

I'd appreciate your opinions. Newegg has it on sale for $109 shipped HERE.

[johnsonx42]

I can't imagine why it wouldn't be a good choice, from a technical point of view. My experience with WD Green drives has been just fine; among other places I use them as server backup drives at several clients. This is also a slightly older drive, so even if you're running XP you don't have to worry about the 4k sector issue.

[Atrus]

Thanks - just seems like these are intended more for storage and don't perform that well as a disk that's being read/written to frequently. I assumed using it in the manner I am intending is right in line with what it was built to handle, just wanted to be sure.

And yup - I am running XP, which is why I was looking at this particular one. $110 for 2tb is a great deal IMO.

[Reddwarf]

Thanks - just seems like these are intended more for storage and don't perform that well as a disk that's being read/written to frequently. I assumed using it in the manner I am intending is right in line with what it was built to handle, just wanted to be sure.

And yup - I am running XP, which is why I was looking at this particular one. $110 for 2tb is a great deal IMO.

I run two of these as a 4Tb RAID array, very quick response and no problem so far (been 8 months now).

[johnsonx42]

Thanks - just seems like these are intended more for storage and don't perform that well as a disk that's being read/written to frequently. I assumed using it in the manner I am intending is right in line with what it was built to handle, just wanted to be sure.

WD Green drives have very good performance for just about any use. They won't win benchmarks in performance-oriented hard drive reviews, that's what WD Black and Velociraptor drives are for. But by no means are they slow. I suppose you could concoct a usage scenario where a Green drive would fall short, like writing a bunch of simultaneous HD video streams (10 or something ridiculous like that).

[ShiningDragon]

In general, this series is a good one. But you shouldn't let run the harddisks nonstop. Here you can read why:
http://translate.google.de/translate?js=...l=de&tl=en

I hope, the google translator did it job good enough to understand, why. ^^

[johnsonx42]

well, that transaltion is a little rough, but I am familiar with the issues raised therein. I do agree that WD Green drives really should not be used for servers, and not in 'real' RAID arrays either. The head parking issue comes up because servers write little bits of data all day and night, in some cases with just enough idle time to repeatedly park and unpark the heads. Use in an HTPC, even as a recording drive, would tend to keep them very busy while recording with no time to park the heads, and then completely idle the rest of the time so the heads can park and stay parked for awhile.

[Reddwarf]

They won't win benchmarks in performance-oriented hard drive reviews

That's why I raid'ed two of them, gives almost 200% performance increase