Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

[weirdlookinguy]

I put a 1TB WD Caviar Green drive in my home server that I set up last month and it's been chugging along great for a while now.

Today on a whim I decided to google how well suited Caviar Green drives were for server use and I found complaints of high failure rates when these drives were put in 24/7 operation. The reason is that WD has made these drives park the read/write heads (aka "Load Cycle") whenever there is no activity for 8 seconds. The MTBF for load cycles is only 300,000.

I loaded up HDTune on my server machine and sure enough, the WD Green only has 408 hours on it but already has 3,914 load cycles. By comparison, the Caviar Black in my main rig has 5,528 hours on it and only 1,004 load cycles.

The solution to making these drives last is to run the DOS utility "wdidle3". You can use it to set the drive to park the heads after 62 minutes of inactivity instead of the ridiculous 8 second default. The utility must be ran from DOS, so you'll need to dig around for a floppy. I have attached it if anybody needs it.

After running wdidle3 on my Caviar Green I also noticed improved performance. The Pentium 3 box it's in booted XP in 20 seconds flat. It's a pretty fresh install of XP, but still impressive for a 700mhz P3.

WD Green seems like a good hard drive besides the load cycle issue. It runs very cool and is the quietest hard drive I have ever owned.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

yeah, the green has always had that problem. The RE3 drives are supposed to be the 24/7 drives. blacks are always safe.

[Scenic]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

interestingly enough, my AV-Series Caviar Green (WD10EVDS) doesn't seem to have that 8 second park timeout.

6320 hours runtime (~263 days) and load cycle count is at 537
edit: start/stop counter is also at 537, power cycle at 533

[dood]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

interestingly enough, my AV-Series Caviar Green (WD10EVDS) doesn't seem to have that 8 second park timeout.

6320 hours runtime (~263 days) and load cycle count is at 537
edit: start/stop counter is also at 537, power cycle at 533

The AV Series, green or not, are designed for 24/7 operation.

I always use the Black series for any desktops or laptops.

[weirdlookinguy]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

I knew I should have gone with Black, but the cheaper and quieter Green was too tempting. Hopefully now that I have altered the load cycle the reliability will be good. Speed is not a concern for my application (that's why I didn't splurge on a Black. I felt that it was overkill).

[Ami Sapphire]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Interesting. I almost bought a WD Caviar Green drive for a replacement backup drive, but I went with a WD Caviar Blue instead. Still, I'll keep this in mind.

[dood]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

I also stick with the Caviar Blacks for their 5 year warranty, versus 3 years on most of the Blue/Green drives.

Only exception to this would be IDE drives (which I still buy quite a few of), where WD does not have a Black drive available.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

This thread linked below has more info on this topic than I care to repost.
I posted a reply on page 5 if you are interested...

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...hp?f=7&t=51401

But here is the relevant response from WD regarding this utility, in relation to a WD RE2-GP SATA II hard drive;

Dear Per,

Thank you for your response.

Unfortunately The WDIdle Utility is no longer available from Western Digital.
The problem here is that WDidle is a tool which was developed for older drives but still works on some new drives.

It was not designed for this and so the outcome can be unpredictable, hence we do not support it.

It can be found throughout the Internet but is no longer distributed by WD

By using WDIdle your drive's firmware is altered and the warranty will be voided.

Sincerely,

[Topcat]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

for mission-critical data and IT grade stuff, its nothing but WD blacks.

[Krankshaft]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

WD Blacks or Blues on any of my rigs I stay away from the Greens.

The main reason that they run quieter is because they spin at 5400 RPMs rather than the standard 7200. For the added silence you take a slight hit in read / write speeds.

Out of all the HDDs I run 24/7 I've only had one 500GB WD Black go belly up (bad sectors corrupting the OS but the data was recovered) so they're pretty good.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Some of the 'Greens' only have a 1yr warranty.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136236

"Environmentally responsible" or "environmentally friendly" on a HDD either means it's going to spin down often or it's BS to start with.

It it doesn't have a 5yr I won't even look at it.
Been using RE but I'd be comfortable with Blacks.
.

[mockingbird]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

RE is a waste of money unless you're running a highly redundant RAID array that is accessible locally, and black edition has just a high failure rate as blue edition eventhough they claim it is an "enterprise design".

With blue and black, the most important factor which determines their quality is how they were shipped. Find a supplier with a steady success rate and stick to them.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

RE is a waste of money unless you're running a highly redundant RAID array that is accessible locally.

I do.
And I don't buy them new.
Many places like data centers or those that do corporate maintenance contracts will change out their drives after two years regardless of the 5yr warranty.
I keep an eye out for those kinds of sellers and drives with 2+yrs warranty left and then buy drives in 10pc-20pc lots [of identical drives].
That cuts the cost down to under 50% [sometimes 20%] of what singles cost as new.
[And it's a lot less than Blacks, Blues, or Greens as new.]
If I get a bum drive WD gives me a new one and thus far I haven't had any fail that were good when I got them.
As used I've only seen one bad RE out of over 250 so the DOA rate is less than buying new drives.
.

[Topcat]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

I do.
And I don't buy them new.
Many places like data centers or those that do corporate maintenance contracts will change out their drives after two years regardless of the 5yr warranty.

Yup. My datacenter always gets new, but I've done this many times for other uses. Saves a ton. I can honestly say that I've never had a bum used one......I cycle them out when the warranties expire, which like you said, is usually a good 2~3 years. I've had more new ones go bad than used ones. Ironic...

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Most drives that have a factory defect are gonna croak in the first year or so.
Buying 5yr warranty drives at ~2yrs old lets someone else filter out all the bad ones.
I really don't mind paying LESS to have SOMEONE ELSE deal with all the problems.
.

[dood]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Yep... when I started working with the company I'm with now (4 years ago) I made the changeover to purchasing all WD drives. I've had a few fail in the first year, but I've never used years 2-5 of the warranty. I now have probably 150 WD drives, in a mix of laptop, desktop, blacks, and blues all in active service.

Ran a quick report out of our helpdesk software... 147 WD drives in active service, out of 277 total machines in inventory. Some 60 of those 277 total are servers, which do not report what drives they have, just the array size. Total number of spindles in the company is much higher than 277, but I have no way to tell if they're WD or not. Our NAS has (4) 1tb WD Black drives... I know that, because I installed them .

Edit - that 277 also contains some VM servers, and an occasional flash drive (if it was plugged in when the inventory took place), so the numbers are mildly inaccurate, no matter what I do.

[NxB]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

You guys use sata/ide in your servers? I only see enterprise drives, SAS, SCSI, FC, etc. Well.. a customer was using a jbod with sata drives but it was the only one.

Many places like data centers or those that do corporate maintenance contracts will change out their drives after two years regardless of the 5yr warranty.

I've never seen them just replace drives like this, more like the opposite: holding on to 9gb scsi drives from 2001. Some people monitor their drives and when the attributes get too bad then they replace even though they still work. I have some "good" bigger drives because of this.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

That is a great deal you have got there PCBONEZ, I know because I've had 2 out of 3 WD RE2 GP drives die on me in the first few months...

And as we saw in the big report that Google released from their datacenters many drives die in their first 3 months.
After that the failure rate goes way down untill they are around 2 years old, then it starts to increase again...
(I first thought it was at around 4 years they started to die, so my text reads a bit strange now but oh well)

Oh, and the RE (Raid Edition) drives are important if you use a RAID controller.
A normal harddrive can take up to a minute to try to read a difficult sector, most RAID controllers will list a non-responding drive as failed after 10>20 seconds...
That is why Time Limited Error Recovery drives exist...

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

You guys use sata/ide in your servers? I only see enterprise drives, SAS, SCSI, FC, etc. Well.. a customer was using a jbod with sata drives but it was the only one.



I've never seen them just replace drives like this, more like the opposite: holding on to 9gb scsi drives from 2001. Some people monitor their drives and when the attributes get too bad then they replace even though they still work. I have some "good" bigger drives because of this.

Here are some examples:
http://cgi.ebay.com/220691997364
http://cgi.ebay.com/360314548819
http://cgi.ebay.com/200575568342
[Not perfect examples, have to watch for those.]

I actually have both SATA and IDE in service.
The older WDxxxxSB IDE RE series are lasting forever.
Been using SATA drives in new builds for a while though. (Cable management is easier.)
I stocked up big time in '09 on 250&500Gb SATAs and I haven't run out yet.
Only bought laptop drives and an occasional Raptor since then.
.

[dood]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

You guys use sata/ide in your servers? I only see enterprise drives, SAS, SCSI, FC, etc. Well.. a customer was using a jbod with sata drives but it was the only one.

Only in that one NAS. It had 4x500gb drives, and I was surprised to find them to be SATA drives, so I just swapped them out with 1tb drives and rebuilt it (this was an HP 1u rackmount NAS, btw). All of our other servers use either 3.5" SCSI drives (in all our older HP servers), or 2.5" SAS drives (in the newer G5's and G6's).

I wasn't exactly clear in describing my numbers above....