wd discontinues its green drive lineup

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Western Digital has had several lines of hard drives for the past few years. Today, the lineup shrinks a bit as the WD Green brand gets folded into the WD Blue lineup. This move is apparently aimed at reducing consumer confusion when shopping for hard drives.

Even with Green drives gone, WD still has a decent number of different colors. There is the Black which is aimed at enthusiasts, the standard consumer Blue, the NAS centered Red and the surveillance oriented Purple. The biggest difference between the Green and Blue drives was the slower spindle speed of the former. While the Blue advertised 7200rpm, the Greens had a range between 5400rpm and 7200rpm but really stuck to about 5600rpm most of the time. The biggest selling points of the Green drives were the reduced power consumption and price compared to the Blue. Of course, this came with a performance penalty due to the slower spindle speed.

By removing the Greens and slotting the Blues in its place, WD is offering a small speed boost to the most budget users. For now, Green drives will be sold under the Blue brand, so be sure to check which specific model you are getting to ensure it's actually a ‘Blue'. In some ways, this change has long been coming. Rival Seagate long consolidated their consumer lineup with the 7200.14/Barracuda lineup which offered the power savings of the Greens but had slightly better performance compared to the Blue.

Source: http://www.eteknix.com/western-digit...es-favor-blue/

this happened about two months ago, so be careful when buying blue drives in future. u could end up with a slow laggy and unreliable hard drive!

bet they also did that as a strategic move since their green drives are dropping like flies, nobody wants to buy them and they actually do not save power. because they are so slow, they spend most of their time at max load fulfilling data requests. also due to their high failure rate, u spend more time and power trying to recover data from them too!

the parkgate issue with green drives did not help matters either as many ppl were annoyed with the head parking on their green drives which were too aggressive.

the green line has developed a bad rep so it makes sense for them to quietly drop the green line and sneak it into the blue line.

imo dropping the rpm to save power is a bad move. tests have shown while it does reduce idle power consumption, it didnt reduce load power consumption much which is the state in which the green drives spend most of their time at since they became so slow.

they should have done what hitachi did with their p7k500 series back in 2007. hitachi tweaked their drive to use 40% less power during load and that made the drive faster (than the green) without slowing it down so much like killing the rpm. i'd say the japanese always get their stuff right. pity ppl dont see that the japanese are actually right all the time.

[UraBahn]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

Eh, good riddance I say. All green drives are a waste of money as they really don't save any power (in fact, once you force-bludgeon their overly-aggressive and performance-stymieing "power reduction" settings off, they're even less efficient than regular mainstream 7200 drives, even though they spin at 5900 rpm. Complete rubbish!) Good to know that Worthless Drives is integrating the reprehensible Green line into their mediocre Blues - now I have a reason to avoid the Blue line completely!

I don't plan on ever buying any WD drive that's not a VelociRaptor, as that's pretty much the only drive from them that's worth anything anymore.

[japlytic]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

My younger sister's WD Green HDD failed as well (no backup!)

[CapLeaker]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

I've got a few of the green WD drives. Out of 7, one failed 2 weeks after the warranty expired (one year), and another one out of old age 7-8 years (it was used as a C drive!). The rest are still spinning. I am also glad, that they are gone. Wouldn't have bought another one as they are slower then molasses at 0C. You can almost measure the performance with a calendar.

[Uniballer]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

They are not "gone". See Green to Blue Details. Apparently they make so much profit on the green drives that they are just "painting them blue" to try to increase sales.

[shovenose]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

They are not "gone". See Green to Blue Details. Apparently they make so much profit on the green drives that they are just "painting them blue" to try to increase sales.

Wow. What BS.

Green drives are such shit. The latest 1TB Blue (WD10EZEX) is very good, but Seagate's ST1000DM003 is a few bucks cheaper and performs the same. Both are quite reliable.

[diif]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/2..._becomes_blue/

[eccerr0r]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

I have just one 2TB "Green" drive... it is slow... Alas I don't really have anything to compare it to other than an SSD (ha!), but even with Linux/systemd on it, it takes a while to boot. The drive light is basically pegged on the whole boot duration.

The warranty just ran out on the drive (2 years), so knock on wood it continues to survive...

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

sry to rain on your parade but most likely it won't. looking at comments around the web, the green drives are notorious for failing just as the warranty expires.

i first bought the 1.5tb green when it first came out. failed within a few months of use as a backup drive. replacement worked well but sold it off a few months before the warranty expired.

also had another 1.5tb green in an elements external drive. drive would hang and freeze in the middle of copying/moving files. was also a pain to defrag. kept hanging and freezing until it eventually developed bad sectors. an even bigger major pain was transferring the data off it due to the slow usb2 interface. then sent it in for rma after transferring the data off. came back from rma as a 3tb external drive. sold it off for slightly below the price of the 1.5tb elements when i bought it.

so it looks like i was lucky in that i had mine fail before the warranty expired. feel sorry for those guys that had their drive fail after the warranty expired.

i also had a samsung ecofail green drive (hd154ui). utter crap. failed 3 times each time after a few months of use. never had such a failure prone drive. sold it off after the third time it came back from rma.

thus i determined no more green crap for me. they do not save power. instead they waste more power instead when they fail and u have to perform data recovery on them.

i also utterly despise the parkgate crap wd put on the green drives. utterly brainless feature the way they set it up...

[cruzinforit]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

I actually have 3 of the green drives in use right now. All 3 are in 24/7 operation in my server alongside 3 3TB Toshiba 7200s. I check the SMART data on them regularly, and so far so good. The oldest one has 34k hours on it at this point. I do have my storage server in a Flexraid snapshot Raid-over-filesystem setup in case I lose one. I did lose a green drive once, but it was within 48 hours of purchasing it the bad sectors started to appear. I purchased it retail so it was a quick replacement at the store. Note that I did perform the wdidle tool to disable headpark on all of them. (Funny story, my pfsense firewall runs a WD Scorpio blue, which I also used wdidle on, and it did in fact disable the head park on that as well!)

[fzabkar]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10...d_hgst_merger/

The good news is that HGST has executed a "reverse buyout" of WD.

A person who was close to the corporate action in Western Digital and HGST said: "All key positions are with HGST people; it's a reverse buyout. First HGST took Coyne's money to buy themselves (probably with a clause that Milligan is becoming CEO) and then they watched WD dismantling itself."

Hopefully Hitachi's superior products will replace WD's, unlike the case of the Seagate/Samsung merger where Seagate replaced Samsung's 3.5" technology with its own.

[kc8adu]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

drives that die shortly after installation were probably mishandled.aka newegg packaging.
there were big bad batches of everything during the flood crisis including wd greens.
i have several 2tb greens in dvr's 24/7/365 with no issues.the turds are the 1.5tb seagate barracuda lp.without exception these all died in under a year.every damm one of em!
the replacements from seagate were standard barracudas.those are ok with a few failures over the last 2 years.this is in a group of over 100 dvr boxes.

[shovenose]

Re: wd discontinues its green drive lineup

drives that die shortly after installation were probably mishandled.aka newegg packaging.
there were big bad batches of everything during the flood crisis including wd greens.
i have several 2tb greens in dvr's 24/7/365 with no issues.the turds are the 1.5tb seagate barracuda lp.without exception these all died in under a year.every damm one of em!
the replacements from seagate were standard barracudas.those are ok with a few failures over the last 2 years.this is in a group of over 100 dvr boxes.

Barracuda LP? *shudder* those are terrible. Slow and unreliable.