Customer Reviews

Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA II 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EARS

5 star:		(109)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

THE QUICK TAKE: The WD10EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital's popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It's a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it's the right drive for you.

The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters - so a 1TB drive has just two platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available. The new models have 64MB of cache.

ADVANCED FORMAT: There's another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512B sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512B logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides an improvement in burst speeds.

ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.

The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install - then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their "Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility" web page - anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.

So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say "WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7." This drive might not a good choice for some XP users - you'll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.

VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, "Western Digital's Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins." They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.

LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.

OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom's Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled "Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB," with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google "Pros And Cons Of Going Green."

I purchased this drive to replace the drive in my Wife's computer that was running out of space. The PC was running Windows 7 and the drive being replaced was a WD3200KS 7200RPM drive.

PC the drive went into: Stock Intel Q6600, Gigabyte GA-EP45-D3SL, 8GB DDR2, and a ATI HD4870.

The Windows install wasn't that old and I didn't really want to mess with getting her all her stuff back so I used a Clonezilla Live CD to clone the old drive to the new one. I then booted straight into Windows 7 off the new drive. Windows asked me to restart so I did and the system was up and running without incident. I then went into the Windows 7 disk manager and extended the partition to fill the whole drive.

Knowing this was an Advanced Format drive but unsure if the alignment would be correct due to the cloning, I downloaded the bootable image for the align utility from the Western Digital site and burned it to a CD. I ran the utility and it indicated that the partition was aligned correctly and there was nothing that needed to be done.

The old drive showed as a 5.4 and the new one as a 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I didn't think that was too bad coming from an older 7200 RPM drive to this. I was a little worried it would be slower but that isn't the case. I haven't personally used the PC enough myself to know but my wife says she notices it is a bit faster and things are quicker to load.

This drive for me was a worthwhile upgrade and money well spent to this point. Only time will tell about the reliability as with any drive.

I bought this hard drive for the purpose of expanding storage of my Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server. As it seems to be the only operating system that there have been no reviews for, I was a bit hesitant to purchase it. However, I have had no issues with this drive. Acer home server makes it very easy to install additional hard drive with front HD bays that are easy to open and require no additional cables. The hard drive was immediately recognized by the operating system, and it took very short time for it to be formated and made available for general use. The hard drive is quiet and thus far very reliable. I can't comment on how "green" it is, but I have not noticed any significant increase in the power consumption nor in the amount of heat that is emitted by the home server.

Just a couple of words of caution: this hard drive is packaged in a bare-bones package, and comes with no instructions or other information. If you have never installed an internal hard drive, you may want to get some information online about what is the best way of doing it for your compute.

I purchased this hard drive in October 2010. It failed in May 2011, that itself was not enough for 1 star but the fun does not end there. When I tried to create RMA in WD website I got surprising message that warranty on my drive ended few days before I bought it. I contacted them via email to explain that I just bought it few months ago and it was advertised as having 3 year warranty and this is response I got :

"Thank you for contacting Western Digital. I apologize for the inconvenience but we can only accommodate for 1 year of shelf life. The manufacture date of this drive was 20-SEP-2007 and your purchase date was in 2010. Unfortunately, your drive does not qualify for warranty update."

So WD basically told me the warranty starts from the manufacturing date not the purchase date. Very dissapointing attitude.. I contacted Amazon and they agreed to take it back. You may want check the warranty status on WD website if you decide to buy their product anyway. I am personally going to stay away from them in the future.

Wanted to replace my smaller boot drive with a large one. Picked this because of cost, "green" attributes and lower running temperatures. Certainly met all of the criteria. Running like a champ! One caveat, be prepared to run an "ALIGN" utility if you're using XP as the O/S. Will take a few hours (based on quantity of data).

Highly recommend.

This drive has far exceeded my expectations. Having a 64MB cache offsets the 7200 RPM's. So technically this drive has a faster access time. Enjoying the performance. Please make sure you read some reviews carefully and not judging by the stars, because some of these reviews have nothing to do with this product.

Bought 3 WD10EARS (WD Caviar Green 1 TB), 2 for Intel RST RAID1 data drive, the other as a spare / clone for the SSD system drive.

2 seem O.K., the other is 30% slower.

I did swap sata ports, no change.

With HD Tune 2.55 read speeds avg:

#1 106 MB/s
#2 92 MB/s
#3 72 MB/s

Did a full scan on the slow poke drive, no errors.

Put the 2 fastest into a RAID 1 array (Intel RST).

HD Tune 2.55 shows a 25% reduction in read speed (73.5 MB/s), but real use testing show much better results:

5.19 GB - 3,956 files

Read from RAID 1, write to SSD - 30 seconds, 173 MB/s

Read from SSD, write to RAID 1 - 60 seconds, 86.5 MB/s

Another test but smaller:

1.5 GB - 1,313 files

Read from RAID 1, write to SSD - 3 seconds, 500 MB/s

Read from SSD, write to RAID 1 - 3 seconds, 500 MB/s

See images for HD Tune 2.55 results

Avoid these drives like plague as they have high failure rate. I have two of them and one failed in less that 12 months with 750MB data on it after using only for backups.
Luckily the drive was under warranty, but WD requires customer to pay for shipping to replace their defective product. To add insult to injury the replacement was a refurbished drive which I fully expect fail even sooner than the brand new one.

Do not be swayed by the low price of these drives as you will have to buy two and back often. Also save your coins for shipping charges and pray drive fails within warranty period otherway you are left with a heavy paperweight. I also have a failed 160GB version of WD drive.Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB Desktop Hard Drive (WD1002FAEX)

Ah, I searched and searched for a replacement hard drive for my Tivo HD and cam across this drive. I installed it and after almost losing all my information on my Tivo because of some issues with understanding the directions and setup, it has worked flawlessly. It is extremely quiet and efficient so far and have no regrets. I executed the wdidle.exe program in order to turn off the parking and have had no problems with the Tivo hanging. If you want something that'll certainly work with your Tivo HD, this is the drive for you. You can't go larger as Tivo HD are limited to just over 1 TB, unless you want to really mess with system. This is the easiest way to go.

I bought this drive to upgrade my girlfriend's computer. OS installed fine and everything seemed good but after one day I started getting random BSODs. Any time the computer goes to sleep, blue screen. Any time you try to move a large file, blue screen.

The computer is all fairly new, just a few months old. I built the original out of all new parts, but used my old 200gb hard drive. It ran fine on that drive for months. The new hard drive has been the only hard ware change.

I updated all my motherboard drivers with no success. TRIED to use Western Digital's diagnostic tool. The quick scan tells me that the hard drive performs fine. If I do the extended scan though, it blue screens a couple hours in. I have tried running it 3 different times.

Gave this drive the benefit of the doubt, but it's obviously crap. This is the first hard drive in my life I have ever had go bad on me, out of maybe 30 drives I've ordered personally and for work.

A side note- the drive came in a box with NO padding. I have never seen a drive ship like that before, it's also the first drive I've purchased from Amazon so apparently that's how they like to ship computer hardware. No bubble wrap or anything, just a drive sitting in a small box. So I'm not sure whether to blame Western Digital for the crappy drive or Amazon's crappy shipping.

One plus though is that I ordered it in the morning and got it the very next day.