Re: Low RPM HDD's...Does they really make a difference??
Crazy_Eddy said:
Even though the 'green' drives have caught up in sequential read/writes, 7200 rpm drives still have the upper hand in access times. This is noticeable whenever there are a lot of small files being randomly accessed, like on your OS. I would say get a 7200 rpm drive since its your OS/program drive.
If you're on a tight budget, get one of the mainstream drives; it doesn't have to be the expensive WD Black.
In that case, it has to be the Seagate 7200.12 . The WD Blue isn't available locally in 1TB capacities yet (someone correct me if i'm wrong).
[OT]
The connection between WD Green drives failing and load/unload count is not true. It just used to trigger alerts in SMART monitoring tools. Even the WD 'fix' just made this parameter invisible to SMART monitoring, but it still happens. Laptop drives park their heads far more often but don't really fail because of that.
I assume you are referring to sequential speeds for green drives. It doesn't drop that low, i.e. 20MB/s.
[/OT]
WD's fix doesn't make the parameter invisible, I've used the WD-idle tool and I can still see the load unload cycle rising but now it has reduced substantially. Using WD idle tool one can set it to park heads to a maximum time of 300sec/5Mins, yes there is another function that allows us to stop the idle-timer but it's giving BSOD errors and very slow transfer rates so it cannot/shouldn't be used.
Well you're absolutely correct that the laptop drives that can have high load/unload cycles since they are built to do so, but the Green series drives have a really bad build quality(basically the reading head assembly) compared to them and cannot take such a huge amount of stress.
The typical lifetime rating for laptop (2.5-in) hard drives is 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles. Since they park their heads in just 8 seconds there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.
Green's are not designed properly to do so, if you run a WD green below 33C you'll be able to hear loud noise whenever the reading head's reading on the disk randomly and it goes away as soon as the temperature reaches the 37C mark. This(low quality) may be due to the low MTBF for this series of HDD's compared to blue and black series.
Apart from that new Greens cannot be used in a RAID setup.
Dude, I'm getting a constant reading speed of >30MB/s on my green WD20EARS but while writing data on it, sometimes it does reach <15MB/s. And my HDD's LCC averages to about 2 LCC per hour which I think is very decent.
I think that WD's green drives are awesome theoretically but looking at what the current nightmarish scene is with these green drives I can hardly recommend it to anyone. They should either be able to stop idle-timer(intelli power saving) or provide a better quality reading head assembly.
