WD Green for Recording Drive?

[Lao Pan]

I've just retired a WD 2tb green (EARS) HDD from my UNRAID server due to Capacity Upgrade (Seagate IronBru 4tb) and and replaced the 1TB Samsung F3 recording drive in the NPVR HTPC with it, along with a SSD for Live TV (Already had SSD for OS) Head parking has been changed from 8 seconds to 300 seconds.
Finally I can use a non raid driver and use TRIM and SMART etc.

Thought I would Run CrystalDiskMark on the drive and was a bit surprised to see that although sequential reads and writes were around 90 MB/s, Random reads and writes were well under 1MB/s.

Has anyone used these green drives for recordings? And how do they cope with Multiple Recordings and Recording / Playback at the same time?

Otherwise I may have to replace with a Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue.

[HarryH3]

I've had a 2TB (WD20EARX) green drive in use for recordings for a few years now. It has no problem recording from 3 tuners at once, while we watch another recording at the same time. I've never run a benchmark on it since it just works.

[pBS]

look at random read/writes on any other drive...they will be similar.
7200 rpm drives will fare a bit better, but not all that much.
[green drives are variable rpm, usually around 5400rpm]
the large cache of green drives helps sequential read/writes, but random can't benefit..
that said, like he said, they work fine for recording..and are low power.

the purple drives are best for dvrs, made for multi-recording and constant access with time limited error recovery which is great for video..
[or any drive made for security dvrs]

[Lao Pan]

Thanks for your replies guys -
I've managed to get the Random Read / Writes up from approx 0.4MB/s to approx 0.7MB/s just by cutting the cable ties between this drives cable and another HDD Cable and moving the cables about an inch apart must have been some crosstalk interference. Sequential Read / Write up a bit to 94MB/s

Was recording 2 HD Channels and watching another the other day without problems, so looks as though the Green drive should suffice.

From what I have read - no one has ever found a WD Green drive rotating at more than 5400rpm. Variable speed smells like Marketing BS to my nose.
Although they never quite said it had variable speed - IntelliPower - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.