WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EARX

by Western Digital

• IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
• And caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
• And offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature and 3rd generation SATA interface.
• WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40%.
• IntelliPower - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate.

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B004VFJ9MK
• Item model number: WD20EARX
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (556 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #53 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Data Storage > Internal Hard Drives
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 6, 2011

Product Description

Size: 2 TB

From the Manufacturer

WD Green Desktop Hard Drives – Cool, quiet operation for efficient eco-conscious computing.

Cool and quiet.
WD GreenPower Technology yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics perfect for ultra-quiet PCs and external drives.

Reduced power consumption.
Best-in-class power management technology delivers significant power savings and solid performance.

Eco-conscious.
WD Green drives are innovatively designed and manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials to help ensure a sustainable future.

Product Features

WD's commitment to sustainability - WD's green initiative goes even further beyond the product level, focusing on recycling and improving the cleanliness of the air, water and land.

Leading the way to green hard drives - WD led the industry in creating a new category of hard drives that use less power and helps to reduce the world's energy demands one computer user at a time. With over 100 million WD Green drives sold* customers using WD Green drives have saved the planet over 466 million kwh of power – nearly equaling the annual power production of a single coal power plant!
*Data reflects approximate drives sold as of June 2012.

Halogen free - In addition to being RoHS compliant, all WD Green drives are lead and halogen free, resulting in less pollutants getting into our environment.

Reduced rare earths dependency - WD's next-generation WD Green hard drives are built using less rare earth minerals.

Conflict-free materials - As a leader in hard drive manufacturing, WD proudly guarantees our hard drives are built with 100% conflict-free raw materials.

IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

NoTouch Ramp Load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Tested for compatibility - We perform tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab to give our customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.

The WD advantage - WD puts our products through extensive Functional Integrity Testing (F.I.T.) prior to any product launch. On average, each new product goes through 600,000 hours of testing. WD also has a detailed Knowledge Base with more than 1,000 helpful articles. You can also call toll-free support 7 days per week in the U.S. and Canada. See the WD Support site for full details.

Upgrading your drive is easy - WD Acronis TrueImage, available as a free download on the WD Support site, enables you to copy all your data to a new drive so you don't have to reinstall your operating system to get all the benefits of a new drive.

WD-certified packaging - All WD drives purchased from Amazon.com are shipped in WD-certified hard drive packaging. It is designed and fully tested to provide WD products with the highest of safety while in transit. With WD-certified packaging, you can rest assured that your WD hard drive will arrive safely, fully protected, in a non-descript, easy-open package.

Compatibility
Works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Recommended use - WD Green hard drives are tested and recommended for use in PCs as secondary storage, external enclosures and other applications that require cool and quiet operation.*

*Desktop drives are not recommended for use in RAID environments, please consider using WD Red hard drives for home and small office 1-5 bay NAS systems and WD Enterprise hard drives for rackmount and >5 bay NAS systems.

Ideal for:

• Adding lots of storage in desktop PCs or external drives
• Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music
• Environmentally-conscious individuals seeking reduced power consumption

Features at a glance

• 500 GB - 3 TB capacity
• SATA 6 Gb/s interface
• Reduced power consumption
• WD GreenPower Technology

You might also consider:

3.5-inch Internal Comparison Chart
	WD Blue	WD Green	WD Black	WD Red	WD VelociRaptor
	Solid performance and reliability for everyday computing.	Cool, quiet operation for efficient eco-conscious computing.	Maximum performance for power computing.	The right drive for home or small office NAS.	High-performance storage for power users.
Ideal for	Family and business computing.	Desktop PCs, secondary storage and external drives.	Photo and video editing, and maxed out gaming systems.	Specifically designed and tested for small office and home office, 1-5 bay NAS systems.	Performance enthusiast systems and workstations.
Capacity range	80 GB – 1 TB	320 GB – 3 TB	500 GB – 2 TB	1 TB – 3 TB	250 GB – 1 TB
Interface	SATA 6 Gb/s PATA 100 MB/s	SATA 6 Gb/s	SATA 6 Gb/s	SATA 6 Gb/s	SATA 6 Gb/s
Form factor	3.5-inch	3.5-inch	3.5-inch	3.5-inch	3.5-inch
Cache	8 MB – 64 MB	64 MB	32 MB – 64 MB	64 MB	64 MB
Highest capacity
Highest performance
Photo/video editing
Network Storage Systems

Product Description

Available in capacities up to 3TB, WD Caviar Green SATA hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. Based on WD's exclusive GreenPower technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute. As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. They are ideal for PCs, external storage and other devices that require lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

378 of 415 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Western Digital seems to be doing better with this newer generation of Green drives January 13, 2012

By T. Sessoms TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Size Name:2 TB|Amazon Verified Purchase

BACKGROUND:

Here's a little background on my WD drive experience, to provide context for the review. For my particular usage and review of this specific product, hop further down.

My previous experience with other WD drives have been anywhere between 100 and 500gb drives, typically the WD Caviar Black or Caviar Blue series which are stout (Black being preferred). To date I still use a 250gb Black model which is almost 10 years old and has been in very harsh conditions, ranging from 0*-130* Fahrenheit sustained ambient temperatures, and has been submitted to multiple shocks and shaking around while in use. Needless to say, it's a proven performer and a very solid platform.

Enter the Green drive era.

The WD Green drives boast lower operating temperatures and of being quieter, which they accomplish by on-the-fly adjustment of the RPM of the spindles, which uses less power and produces less heat or noise in the process. Essentially these perform no faster than 5400rpm (some have suggested 5900), rather than 7200rpm, and they will cycle off or go into a low power state at various times.

Some might wonder why such a large drive with "environmental" features, can be so inexpensive compared to the Blue or Black series drives of the same (or less) size. Basically it boils down to reliability. Do your research on the WD Green drives on a lot of tech sites and you'll find that the first generation units had lots of issues because of their "green" features. For example, my experience below

This is my 4th WD Green drive of large capacity, the previous three being 1TB units and first generation. Two of the previous three are also dead, I might add. These 3 previous drives were purchased back in 2010.... The first one to die, did so within about a week of use.

It started having issues with it not wanting to come out of its powered-down mode, and shortly thereafter I started hearing the deadly "click.... click..." noise, indicating a head crash. The drive was unusable, and I later verified that the heads did in fact have a physical failure. I took the drive apart and found that when going into a low-power cycle the heads parked themselves too harshly or somehow went too far past the head park zone, so several of them got caught on the plastic locking lane. As soon as the arm tried landing on the platters, it ripped several of the heads off and scratched the platters.

The other drive, it's replacement and same exact model, died within about a month. Not a head crash, but was having intermittent spindle issues with not wanting to properly spin.

The third drive I've had ever since, and haven't had any major issues with it, but on a couple of occasions in the past year it has randomly powered down of its own accord (hard power down), and I lost some data.

HDD RPM SPEED 5400 or 7200:

If you're wondering which is better: 5400 or 7200, here's a little tidbit of info: The 5400 models spin slower, have a higher latency (seeking around the drive), but transfer more data overall. The 7200 models spin faster, have lower latency (can bounce around the drive faster), but provide less data per transfer.

What this means is, if you need a drive as your primary "program" drive, which will be doing frequent drive access and bouncing all over the place, doing work with many smaller files, then you'll want a drive with lower latency such as the 7200. On the other hand, if you just need a large storage drive for storing many large files, for example movies or other huge files, then a 5400 drive would be perfect.

Look at it this way, say you have a lot of small piles of leaves in your yard, and you need them bagged. If your bagger was a 7200, it could go from one pile to the next much faster than a 5400 could, but its performance benefits will be best with smaller piles. A 5400 would work best with fewer much larger piles.

SPEED SUGGESTION:

If you're concerned about overall speed and want this drive, once you have the majority of your files in place, run a good defrag tool every now and then to help keep all the files in sequence. This prevents the drive from having to bounce around so much. Also, WD provides a file alignment tool which you can use. They suggest using it once you have everything setup the way you want it. The link for this tool is on their website, and on the label of the drive.

MY USAGE OF THIS DRIVE:

The WD20EARX has so far, (a week into things), been very good to me. If you're curious about model designations, here's a couple of examples to help you while you search for your drive:

EARX - The SATA 6gb/sec (600MB/sec) interface (backwards compatible with slower SATA slots)
EARS - The SATA 1.5gb/sec (150MB/sec) interface

I'm using this as both a boot drive and a data drive, something I don't usually do but for my use I want only one drive in the system. It's going to store about 1.5tb of data, mostly in only a few files which are mostly 8-10gb in size each. Latency wasn't a concern for me, so the slower Green drive didn't bother me. Boot times and program loading has actually been surprisingly fast, faster than my other Green drive.

System: Shuttle XPC
Motherboard: SN95G5 - 2.6ghz Athlon64 - 2gb ddr2 ram
Interface: SATA 1.5gb (150MB/sec)
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3
Boot Speed: ~10 seconds (Once POST ends until I have a working desktop)

From the time the bootloader engages until the time I'm at a working desktop, it's about 10 seconds. Shockingly good performance for a green drive. Your experience may vary.

PROS:

* Large capacity, low price thanks to Amazon Prime

* Western Digital has a good reputation and warranty

* This newer generation green drive seems to be much better than the previous, including a redesigned PCB and power traces

* Full backwards compatibility with older SATA interfaces

* Includes a jumper spot in case you need to manually set SATA speed or go into technicians mode

* Lower power consumption, temperatures and sound signature, if that matters to you

CONS:

* Still worried about how the last few Green drives went

OTHER THOUGHTS:

* My past experience makes me uncomfortable with the Green drive movement, but I'm hoping they've worked out the kinks in this new redesign and will post any updates..

* Be aware that Windows XP will not be able to use a single partition larger than 2tb. Windows Vista or 7 will handle larger than 2tb at a time Read more ›

135 of 149 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great storage drive, but decreased speed August 22, 2011

By Steve

Size Name:3 TB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have tons of WD drives and they've been around for awhile (including two 2tb 'green' drives), so I decided to give this one a chance even with the half/half ratings it had.

This drive is great! Popped it into my esata dock, turned it on, and windows disk management saw it instantly, as the full ~2.7tb. Initialized it, making sure to pick GPT, and then formatted it. Windows saw the whole partition, no fuss.

To test the drive, I did a low level format, then a disk check. When both came back fine, I copied as many files as I could fit on the drive, and then did another disk check. Came back fine again, so I ran DiskMark to see what speeds I was getting. When the drive was almost full (~3gb free), I was averaging around 30-40MBps. after I reformatted and ran the test again, I averaged ~60MBps. Compare this to a smaller hard drive and you will see that this is considerably slower. (I just ran DiskMark on a full WD 500GB drive that's about 5 years old, and it averaged 80MBps)

However, 30MBps is plenty of speed to stream movies, which is what I'm using it for. This drive won't make the best boot drive, but it makes a great archival one.

As I've only owned it for about a week now, I can't comment on long term reliability, but I will update if anything happens.
For now, I do recommend this drive.

Edit 11.15.11
After owning this drive for a couple of months now without any failures, it is a very attractive option. However, your mileage may vary, since mine seems to be a bit slower than a friend's who bought the same version (I was getting around 60-80MB/s while the drive was pretty full when I was copying files to his). All-in-all it's a good drive.

55 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, cheap drive for a Raid Array or Solo Use December 25, 2011

By OIObserver

Size Name:3 TB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have a total of seven of these drives between 6 on a raid array on one PC and one as a data drive (non raid) in another PC.

They are slower at RPM speed than some other drives, at 5400 RPM so if you are someone who "needs" a 7200 RPM drive then you do not need this.

They are however the CHEAPEST, MOST RELIABLE CHEAP drive out there. Unlike some brands who will sell you a 5400rpm drive for this, or the various drawbacks from externals, this drive is inexpensive, not annoying in its "green" power management (or needing to have it shut off) and its fast, I get good speed in my 6gb/sec Sata3 port, and overall think its great that for this price, I get a drive with a 3 year warranty, reasonably fast transfer rates despite a lower RPM (RPM is not everything apparently) and its a Western Digital (and not lower on quality) for the price.

Western Digital have been reliable drives for me, for many years. I have some going back as far as 8 years old and still running (that does not mean one has never died) but it's not common. It's more common that the storage size becomes too small for me and gets it shelved than the drive fails.

I am optimistic by the early performance of these Caviar Greens that I will continue to use these for a 3tb drive. For 2tb drives I prefer the Caviar Black (which is not made in 3tb size). I was apprehensive to go to another brand, so chose WD's lower line rather than risk a brand who has not performed well for me for years.

Five stars are for the value, and the fact it delivers.... I would like to see a 7200rpm 3tb from WD someday come around, such as a Caviar Black 3tb, but until they do, I am happy to buy these, despite I usually buy the Blacks (I do need bigger than 2tb occasionally) or like for my raid array which runs 6 3tb caviar greens, wanted the array to be bigger then 6 2tb blacks would achieve.

Buy this drive with a clean conscience, it will work for you, and work well. I never have had a DOA from WD, I am sure it happens, but I have 6 pcs, and for that to never have happened, is great.

WD! Caviar! and this time GREEN ain't that bad.
In fact for its price, you cannot beat it. Read more ›