WD Green Power - a new quiet 3.5" hdd standard

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JazzJackRabbit
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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Wed Apr 16, 2008 8:26 am

Does anybody know how hot 1TB model runs? Specifically how hot does it run without any airflow?

amyhughes
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Post by amyhughes » Thu May 01, 2008 1:31 am

I installed the 500G version today. I'm disappointed with the seek noises. Perhaps it's because of lesser noise overall, and maybe because I've done a lot to quiet my system the last week or so, but this sounds like a chattery drive. Seek noises are sharp and very audible over the PSU and 1000 RPM Nexus and 600 RPM Scythe fans I have running.

So, I installed it in a Logisys HD-Silencer. This reduced by perhaps half the seek noises, and also reduced the drive temperature by 4C. Inside the silencer I don't hear anything at all from the drive except the seek noises, and the clack the drive makes when it goes into or comes out of idle. The clack is sharper yet and higher-pitched than the seek, but I don't find it annoying since it's only an occasional occurrance. You have to stop touching your machine for a while before Windows will leave the drive alone and allow it to idle.

Even before I installed it in the silencer it was clear the drive makes little vibration; idle or seek. That's probably why the seeks sound sharp. They are higher-pitched because they aren't transfering much to the case. The reduction in whine is also apparent even without the silencer.

Performance-wise, the only thing I've noticed is that (subjectively) there is a longer period between the time you get a Windows desktop and the drive stops accessing and the hourglass cursor goes away. Loading Photoshop and other large apps doesn't seem to take longer at all.

I measure a 3 watt difference in idle power usage, increasing to 5 watts once the drive idles. Running prime95, Second Life, and a system-wide file search all simultaneously, the drive temp as reported by smartctl was 33C, or 29C in the silencer, which acts as a big heat sink. I only ran that test for about 10 minutes, though. The temp only increased by 1 degree in that time, though. The idle temps were 32C and 28C, out of and in the silencer, respectively.

I'm mostly delighted with the drive, as installed in the silencer. I'd probably be less so otherwise, though the reduced wine and vibration is probably worth the price of admission, anyway. My biggest wish is that there was a cheaper, one-platter, 250G version. I replaced a 160G drive with a 500G drive just for the noise characteristics.

BratWalnut
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Post by BratWalnut » Fri May 16, 2008 10:00 am

I going to buy two of them, one of them is going to my car computer.

In a car environment, the less power, the better. I'm using a DC-DC 230W capacity, I can't barely drive a DVDROM. The less stress on my 5V rail, the better (the weakest link in my setup).

Here is my CarPC build:

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/worklog ... puter.html

Immortals
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Post by Immortals » Fri May 16, 2008 1:00 pm

amyhughes wrote:I installed the 500G version today. I'm disappointed with the seek noises. Perhaps it's because of lesser noise overall, and maybe because I've done a lot to quiet my system the last week or so, but this sounds like a chattery drive. Seek noises are sharp and very audible over the PSU and 1000 RPM Nexus and 600 RPM Scythe fans I have running.
Did you enable AAM? I couldn't hear anything when my fans were at 800rpm. Only when I reduced them to 500rpm did the seeks become the dominant sound

Goldmember
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Post by Goldmember » Wed May 21, 2008 7:47 am

The 1TB GP has been updated with 334GB platters. The model number is WD10EACS-D6B0.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... tml?i#d6b0

FartingBob
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Post by FartingBob » Wed May 21, 2008 8:39 am

Can anyone confirm this new version is coming to europe?

Mats
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Post by Mats » Fri Oct 17, 2008 12:48 pm

I don't know if it has been posted already, but WD have a press release about their second generation GP drives.
I saw it a couple of weeks back, and I get a bit confused about how to get the latest version.
The first version is the one reviewed here, the second one is the one Goldmember talked about, but is this press release about a third version or the second version?

The only new model is the 32 MB version (WD10EADS), but what if you'd like to have the second generation of one of the other models?
WD made it pretty hard for us by telling us about a new product and then not telling us how to get it. I guess you need the code after the model number, like the D6B0 code.

16 MB: Western Digital Caviar Green 1000GB 16MB SATA II (WD10EACS)
32 MB: Western Digital Caviar Green 1000GB 32MB SATA II (WD10EADS)
Retail: Western Digital Caviar Green 1000GB 16MB SATA II (WD10000CSRTL2)
Enterprise: Western Digital RE2 GP 1000GB SATA II (WD1000FYPS)
AV-GP: Western Digital AV-GP 1000GB SATA II (WD10EVCS)

dhanson865
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Post by dhanson865 » Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:39 pm

I don't know where the press release is but they also announced WD6400AACS some time back and it is significant as you don't have to play games figuring out the platter size like you do on the 1 TB models.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=565

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-701229.pdf

You are getting the same platters in the 640 no matter if it is Black, Blue, or Green. The difference will be firmware changes and RPMs. The Black or Blue will be 7200 RPM with firmware optimized for performance at the cost of noise and power vs the Green at 5400 RPM with firmware optimized for lower noise and power at the cost of performance.

Oh and if it helps here is a comparison from WD specs for the three 640GB models

Code: Select all

640GB            Black   Blue   Green
Cache in MB      32      16     16
AVG Latency ms   4.2     4.2    ?.? (this is a function of RPM)
RPM              7200    7200   IntelliPower (treat that as 5400)
Drive Ready Time 11 sec  13     14.3
Load/Unload      300,000 ??     300,000 (blue listed Start/Stop of 50,000)
Warranty         5       3      3
R/W Power watts  8.3     8.3    5.4
Idle Power watts 7.7     7.7    2.5
Standby watts    1       1      0.46
Sleep            1       1      0.46
Max shock        300     300    300
Idle dBA         25      25     24
Performance seek 29      29     29
Quiet seek       26      26     25
Black = WD6401AALS
Blue = WD6400AAKS
Green = WD6400AACS

Just don't go trying to compare the 500GB or 750GB models like that as they use different platters. The 640 is unique in that we know the platter size when buying it.
If you don't need the 1.0 TB+ models then I think the 640GB black and green make a lot of sense for their respective target audiences.

SSDs and Velociraptors take some of the attraction away from the Black but at the price difference it is still a viable budget gaming choice.

And of course the Green is ideal for secondary drives, near line storage, backup, media servers, etc...

Mats
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Post by Mats » Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:51 pm

Thanks for the info.
The press release I'm talking about is in my last post, it's not possible to include an URL that contains a "=" so here it is:
http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/ ... 56892205EA}

Yeah you see what happens, just copy the whole line.

Mats
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Post by Mats » Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:54 pm

I want to see performance reviews of the 32 MB version. If anyone finds it, please post a link here.

Here is the press release:
WD® SHIPS SECOND-GENERATION GREEN™ HARD DRIVES WITH SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED POWER EFFICIENCY AND PERFORMANCE
WD's Best Selling Eco-friendly WD Caviar® Green Drive Continues to be the Most Power-Efficient, Coolest and Quietest 3.5-inch Hard Drive in the Market

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Oct. 1, 2008 - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the second-generation of its highly popular and environmentally friendly WD® Caviar® Green™ desktop hard drives, which feature the company's GreenPower™ technology to significantly reduce power consumption, compared with standard hard drives. The new platform is based on WD's 333 GB/platter technology with 32 MB cache, producing capacities ranging from 500 GB to 1 TB1.

As an innovative leader in green storage technology, WD has ramped up its successful GreenPower technology-based hard drives to greater than 10 percent of its 3.5-inch hard drive shipments in the initial twelve months of production, making low-power technologies one of WD's fastest growing segments and WD Caviar Green one of the most successful new products in the company's recent history.

WD's latest WD Caviar Green hard drives consume up to 20 percent less power and offer a 10 percent increase in performance over the previous version2, while continuing to provide the market with hard drives enabling quieter and cooler-running desktop PCs and external storage devices.

"WD's first-to-market offering of green technology has generated positive customer experience, while lessening the burden on our natural resources," said Don Bennett, vice president and general manager of WD's desktop business unit. "Compared with competitive drives, customers realize a reduction in power consumption, leading to less heat generation, which enables greater long-term reliability in all applications."

Cool, Quiet Hard Drives
The following technologies enable WD's Caviar Green hard drives:
IntelliPowerâ„¢ - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. Additionally, GreenPower drives consume less current during startup allowing lower peak loads on systems as they are booted.
IntelliSeekâ„¢ - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
NoTouchâ„¢ ramp load technology - Designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection in transit.

Availability and Pricing
All WD Caviar Green hard drives may be ordered through select distributors and resellers. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 1 TB hard drives (model WD10EADS) is $219.00 USD. More information about WD Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=559

1 The 32 MB cache is only available on the WD Caviar Green 1 TB model (WD10EADS)
2 Based on previous generation WD Caviar Green 1 TB hard drives.

matt_garman
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Post by matt_garman » Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:52 am

I have four of the "RE2" version of the 1 TB WD GreenPower drives (model WD1000FYPS). I'm using them in a software RAID5 NAS.

Until yesterday, I was quite happy with their cool and quiet operation. And then I found this thread. It's from the Linux Kernel Mailing List; you can find many archived versions by searching for "Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux".

The gist is that the read/write head on these drives parks itself too often. While this does result in power savings while parked, the drives are only designed to support 300k parks (consumer drives) or 600k parks (enterprise/RE2 edition).

I don't know if this problem exists on Windows or not. I would assume it does, at least under some scenarios.

On Linux, I use a program called smartctl to read SMART data from the drive. This program is also available on Windows (but I'd wager there are also GUI-based tools that do the same).

Either way, the smart data will show how many times the head has been parked via the "Load_Cycle_Count" parameter.

An (edited) example from one of my drives:

Code: Select all

smartctl -a /dev/sda
Power_On_Hours   3377
Load_Cycle_Count 97972
That averages out to 29 loads/hour... every two minutes!

The "solution" so far has been to use the "wdidle3.exe" DOS utility provided by Western Digital to change the head-park idle timer to a different value (or disable it all together). I just found out about this issue yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to actually do try this yet. I found this FTP site that has a copy of the wdidle3.exe program.

Anyway, if anyone else has any info on this issue, I'm eager to hear it.

Elvellon
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Post by Elvellon » Wed Oct 22, 2008 7:31 am

I've been worrying about the same. The wdidle3 utility doesn't disable dead parking on my WD5000AACS, instead it sets the time to 63 (6,3 seconds). I've set it to the maximum value, 255 (25,5 secs), apparently it works.

clalor
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Post by clalor » Wed Oct 22, 2008 8:19 pm

matt_garman wrote:Until yesterday, I was quite happy with their cool and quiet operation. And then I found this thread. It's from the Linux Kernel Mailing List; you can find many archived versions by searching for "Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux".
Perfect timing on this subject. I'm building a Linux file server this weekend using four WD5000AACS drives and was unaware of this issue. Two of the four drives that are going into this server are currently installed in another Linux box and running smartctl on them showed some interesting results. Both drives were set to a default timer value of 8000 ms according to the wdidle3 utility.

Drive 1 - Installed in my Windows XP desktop since May of this year, moved to the Linux box last week:

Code: Select all

Power_On_Hours     1392
Load_Cycle_Count  57383
That's an average of 41.2 loads/hour and puts me at almost 20% of the 300k total load/unload cycles after only five months of service. :shock: The drive has spent its life as a Truecrypt encrypted volume and, until last week, plugged into a Intel ICH9R controller on the Windows box.

Drive 2 - Purchased last week, installed in the Linux box at the same time:

Code: Select all

Power_On_Hours    109
Load_Cycle_Count  440
That's only 4.0 loads/hour average, but it's been powered for such a small amount of time that there's probably not enough data here to make this a valid number.

It may not matter, but both drives are currently running on a Rosewill RC209 SATA PCI card with a Silicon Image Sil3144 controller chip.

kinotix
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Post by kinotix » Thu Oct 23, 2008 3:46 pm

dhanson865 wrote:I don't know where the press release is but they also announced WD6400AACS some time back and it is significant as you don't have to play games figuring out the platter size like you do on the 1 TB models.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=565

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-701229.pdf

You are getting the same platters in the 640 no matter if it is Black, Blue, or Green. The difference will be firmware changes and RPMs. The Black or Blue will be 7200 RPM with firmware optimized for performance at the cost of noise and power vs the Green at 5400 RPM with firmware optimized for lower noise and power at the cost of performance.

Oh and if it helps here is a comparison from WD specs for the three 640GB models

Code: Select all

640GB            Black   Blue   Green
Cache in MB      32      16     16
AVG Latency ms   4.2     4.2    ?.? (this is a function of RPM)
RPM              7200    7200   IntelliPower (treat that as 5400)
Drive Ready Time 11 sec  13     14.3
Load/Unload      300,000 ??     300,000 (blue listed Start/Stop of 50,000)
Warranty         5       3      3
R/W Power watts  8.3     8.3    5.4
Idle Power watts 7.7     7.7    2.5
Standby watts    1       1      0.46
Sleep            1       1      0.46
Max shock        300     300    300
Idle dBA         25      25     24
Performance seek 29      29     29
Quiet seek       26      26     25
Black = WD6401AALS
Blue = WD6400AAKS
Green = WD6400AACS

Just don't go trying to compare the 500GB or 750GB models like that as they use different platters. The 640 is unique in that we know the platter size when buying it.
If you don't need the 1.0 TB+ models then I think the 640GB black and green make a lot of sense for their respective target audiences.
If numbers from TechReport's review are correct, noise, power consumption, and even performance of Caviar Black (WD6401AALS) appear to be very disappointing compared to Caviar Blue (WD6400AAKS).
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15363/13


Image
Image
Are seek noise levels of a WD6400AAKS and WD Green Power the same?! :shock: Humm...

Image
Image
WD6400AAKS boots faster than a VelociRaptor!?... :?

dhanson865
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Post by dhanson865 » Fri Oct 24, 2008 4:40 am

kinotix wrote: Black = WD6401AALS
Blue = WD6400AAKS
Green = WD6400AACS


If numbers from TechReport's review are correct, noise, power consumption, and even performance of Caviar Black (WD6401AALS) appear to be very disappointing compared to Caviar Blue (WD6400AAKS).
You are severely confused my friend. The drive in that review marked "black" is Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA WD1001FALS not the drive I mentioned in any way, shape, or form.

There is a reason I mentioned the 640GB black specifically. It uses two platters.

Code: Select all

Black 640GB vs 1TB comparison

Drive Ready Time 11 sec  13
R/W Power watts  8.3     8.4
Idle Power watts 7.7     7.8
Standby watts    1       1
Max shock        300     250
Performance seek 29      33
Quiet seek       26      29
It's not that hard to see that the 1TB model is going to be louder, slower to spin up, more expensive, use more power, run hotter, and is more vulnerable to shock (physical damage).

Like I said there were reasons I specified the 640GB models.

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Post by Nick Geraedts » Fri Oct 24, 2008 9:00 am

Regarding the load/unload count speculations (since that's all they are at the moment*), has anyone contacted WD about the issue? Most of my WD10EACS drives are reporting load/unload counts in the 250K-300K range after a few months of use.

However, I'm not really worried. The load/unload count isn't going to be any sort of indication of impending doom. I've seen a number drives that have "rolled over" the 1,000,000 mark of load/unload cycles - and those were old Hitachi Deathstars... much less robust than today's hard drives.


*The reason why I say this is speculation is because S.M.A.R.T. doesn't give us any indication of what constitutes a load/unload cycle, and whether it's actually a hard cycle or a soft cycle (in some drives, there are 4 or more "idle" states). If the WD GP drives are putting the heads into an idle position (which isn't a full unload), then I doubt that would constitute a count towards their rated load/unload specifications.

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Re: WD Green Power - a new quiet 3.5" hdd standard

Post by Devonavar » Wed May 02, 2018 8:30 pm

Holy thread necromancy, batman! But, since I'm the OP, I can do that :wink:

I thought this drive was great when I originally reviewed it just over ten years ago. It was the quietest drive we had ever reviewed, the lowest power drive we had ever reviewed, and on par with the largest drive we had ever reviewed.

Now, ten years later, I can also say it's one of the longest-lasting (based on the highly unscientific sample size of one).

Since I reviewed the drive ten years ago, the original review sample has lived in my HTPC as a media drive. Today, I decommissioned it, not because it stopped working, but because it was too small! (Think about that ... when I reviewed my first 1TB drive, I made a point of calculating the absurd amount of media it could hold.) It will be put out to pasture as a backup OS drive for my main workstation, where it will replace a venerable old Samsung Spinpoint HD401LJ (manufactured June 2006!) — also still in good working order.

The drive has 67,398 power on hours (according to Wolfram Alpha, that's 7.689 "average" Gregorian years). Not sure where the other 2.3 years went, but I guess I must have had it powered off for *some* of those ten years.

It also has a 3,127,622 "load cycle count" — meaning its heads have been parked roughly once every 77 seconds. This is the only SMART value that has any signs of anything unusual (still at 001 ... the Threshold value is 000, whatever that means). Shortly after my review was published, there was much ado made about this excessive loading/unloading, with many concerns about the drive's longevity. Eventually Western Digital updated the model to reduce the frequency of its head parking — but it clearly had no effect on the longevity of my drive.

The drive has outlived at least three motherboards in my HTPC, along with numerous other drives (most recently, I had an 8TB PMR Seagate drive start showing corrupt sectors after less than two years ... I've had VERY bad luck with PMR tech).

So, I wanted to salute this drive here ... and officially name it the best hard drive I've ever owned (yes, that's an absurd, and an absurdly geeky thing to say).

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