Western Digital Green Drives?

[SLR_65]

I see Western Digital has a 1.5 TB drive for just a little more than the troubled Seagate 1.5 TB.

It's in their "green" series though - supposed to use less power, run cooler, etc..

Anyone have any experience with the green drives? Are they appropriate for an HTPC?

Thanks!

Steve

[pcostanza]

I have a few of the Seagate 1TB and a WD 640 but no greens. A friend has a 1TB green and said it runs fine but said if he'd do it over again, he'd get the WD Black as it was faster. Personally, I don't think it makes much difference for an HTPC. But, you'll get a better price on the 1TB now that the 1.5's are popular and the 2's are coming out. There's deals to be had.

[Deusxmachina]

I have a green 500gb. I'm not sure I've ever heard it make a noise.

Basically, the greens are 5400rpm drives. There's a good article out there somewhere that I can't find at the moment reviewing them for an HTPC. Most laptops use 5400rpm drives, and the author of that article on that HTPC site has recommended using 5400rpm drives for years due to the lower noise and heat and perhaps power. Generally, the drives are mainly just dumping grounds for media files, so quick accessing and whatever doesn't really matter.

I've also played some fairly intensive games off of that drive, (The Witcher, for instance, which is awesome), and I think I even played Crysis off it. Played fine.

Found it. To sum up:
"In real terms, the performance difference is minimal. The vast majority of laptops use 5,400 RPM drives, and few people complain that this isn't fast enough. We've been recommending 5,400 RPM notebook drives as a quiet storage alternative for years now. Besides, the large 250 GB platters in the Green Power go a long way to mitigating the performance penalty of the slower rotation speed."

"It's the quietest desktop drive we've ever tested. It's the most efficient drive we've ever tested. And it comes in capacities up to 1 TB. What more do you want? As far as SPCR is concerned, this could be the perfect drive — at least until flash media takes over."

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page1.html

[teookie]

I have the 1TB green drive in my HTPC and have no complaints. Cool, quiet, and huge. Works for me.

[SLR_65]

Just an update . . . I bought a WEd 1.5TB green drive and have had it installed and running for a few weeks now and it's working GREAT!

I'm only using standard def TVs, but I have several HD avis and h.264s and they all play fine.

I can also watch one program off of the WD with the server and another program off the WD with the client with no issues, so it seems to be fast enough for our needs!

And it is whisper quiet!

So far it's one of the best upgrades I've done!

[gazoo]

I have a 1tb and a 500gb green. Very very cool temps, amazingly so. Apparently, it's supposed to be really reliable too. It won't win any speed contest though, but I can't really notice it. I use the 500 in the GBPVR HTPC server and the 1tb on my gaming/office/kick butt Quad Core desktop.

[SickBoy]

I have two of them and have had no issues using them as storage drives in both my HTPC and main desktop.

I tried to use the first one I had as a system drive for my HTPC, and had issues (never got Windows to fully complete the installation process). Apparently, using these as system drives is either not supported or not recommended.

But aside from that, they're been great.

[SLR_65]

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 made an effort to watch downstairs on the main htpc for a bit and it seemed to be working fine so I pulled the client pc and installed the popcorn hour from the bedroom in it's place until the holidays were over and I had more time. That seemed to fix it as I didn't notice any more stuttering issues. Later though it froze up right in the middle of a show on me. My son said the main pc had done that to him a couple times, but he hadn't noticed it on the popcorn hour. This time when it froze I got an error code on the main htpc, some i/o error problem. Pulling the smart drive info showed the drive healthy but it had increasing reallocation instances. I tried a defrag but the drive wasn't fragmented. I tried to run a comprehensive test on the drive with the WD drive tool off of their website but after a while it freezes the computer up again and gave the i/o error. I decided to pull the files off of it onto an external drive and I found if I tried to pull a lot of data at once it would hang and give the i/o error. If I moved a couple gig at a time though it seemed to hang in a lot longer.

I did get the data off the drive and I stuck an older, smaller sata drive in it's place and it's played ever since without a hickup, so the 1.5tb Green drive definitely has a problem. :mad:

It's still under warranty, but I'm thinking I may look at a Seagate as they seem to have their problems sorted out now.

Anyway, many have had good success with the Green drives but as usual, I won the lottery and got the problem child!

Oh, I think the popcorn hour just buffers more so I think the reason the stutters were less noticable on it was because the buffer was masking the problem.

TTYL,

Steve

[donschjr]

It's a shame you got a bad drive. I have a 1 tb green drive for about 4 months now and it's great. I can have 2 caps going while watching another with no problems so I think they're plenty fast enough for storage.

[SLR_65]

Mine ran for 8 months without a problem. It was plenty fast too - I could have caps going, be watching a file off of it on the client pc, and have the popcorn hour and egreat running in other rooms to boot.

It was fine . . . until it quit!

It happens . . . it really surprised me though as I've had really good luck with Western Digital drives. There's probably a reason they went from a 5 year warranty to 3 years on these drives though. 8-(

/Steve