seeking recommendations for hard drive replacement

[Nick R]

Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
There are four basic different types of Western Digital drives,
the Black, a robust hard use drive,
the Green, a light use drive that shuts off to save power
the Blue, a laptop drive, not as robust as the black
The Red, a Black drive with the Green's power saving features.

On the Red and Greens, Western Digital is having problems with the Intellipark,
which is supposed to put the drive to "sleep" to save power.
The wait time is too short.
and drives are constantly waking and sleeping,
with the result that they wear out.

Adjust the wait time to a higher number....


That can be relatively easily remedied with the wdidle3 tool from WD. FWIW, I haven't had any issues with my two AV-GP (basically greens, with a slightly different firmware), and my original Green has a lot of L/U cycles, with no ill effects.

A friend of mine has one in his server with something like 600k load/unload cycles, still working fine.

 

[barlowc]

Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
There are four basic different types of Western Digital drives,
the Black, a robust hard use drive,
the Green, a light use drive that shuts off to save power
the Blue, a laptop drive, not as robust as the black
The Red, a Black drive with the Green's power saving features.

The Blue is not just a laptop drive. Both the Desktop and Mobile lineups have Blue, Green, Black, and Red options. Blue is basically described as your standard, general use drive.

At this point in time I'm leaning towards the Seagate Hybrid drive. The WD Black is my second choice. I'm just trying to decide if I got with 1 TB or jump up to 2 TB while I'm at it.

 

[C1KLTX]

Originally Posted By: barlowc
At this point in time I'm leaning towards the Seagate Hybrid drive. The WD Black is my second choice. I'm just trying to decide if I got with 1 TB or jump up to 2 TB while I'm at it.


You can't go wrong with either, but I would lean toward the Seagate, seeing as its used as a boot drive as well. If you do go with the 1TB Seagate hybrid and have a Bestbuy close by, they will price match it to Amazon or Newegg. I prefer to get the retail packaging for Hard drives, they get less shock then OEM drive packaging.

 

[barlowc]

Thanks to everyone for their input! I just ordered the Seagate Hybrid on Amazon, which is convenient with free Prime shipping. I got the 2 TB one for $112.50.

I'm going to try to document some before and after metrics and will update this thread with them.

 

[NJC]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
That can be relatively easily remedied with the wdidle3 tool from WD. FWIW, I haven't had any issues with my two AV-GP (basically greens, with a slightly different firmware), and my original Green has a lot of L/U cycles, with no ill effects.

~1yr ago you had a 640GB Black WDC with ~40K hrs. Is that still kicking? I have the same drive with about 25K hrs.