Customer Reviews

Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS

5 star:		(340)
4 star:		(99)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(36)
1 star:		(88)

 

 

I have bought a LOT of the 2TB WD Caviar drives. I have had excellent results with them on my iMac. I use them primarily for data storage where fast data retrieval is not a consideration. I'm more concerned with plugging them into these USB-based drive docks when I need the data. However, I'm also interested in them from an electrical perspective, just because ... well, just because I'm interested in them. Over the years I have worked my way up the ladder of hard drive storage capacities. Like many of you, I've been rather appalled at how hot these older models would get. I swear, you could fry an egg on some of them. I never felt comfortable with their longevity, fearing that they would most likely burn themselves up. Fortunately, none did.

When the Caviar Green product line came out (1TB was when I first took notice), I was quite intrigued at the claimed power reduction. In electronics, heat is the main enemy of components. Usually every 10 degree C rise in temperature translates into a halving of component life. The Caviar brand looked like a way to get a much more reliable drive if the power reduction numbers actually panned out.

I took one of the drives in to work where I have fancy test gear at my disposal. In particular, I have some very good Tektronix current probes that let me measure DC and AC currents. I built a little cable that let me get to the +12V and +5V lines so that I could clamp my current probes around the wires to measure current consumption. I connected the two power leads to power supplies so that I could also vary the two voltages. In this fashion, I can accurately see and measure power consumption of the drive as I exercise the drive. I get far more accurate measurements this way than you can with a simple watt-meter, which seldom let you see fractional watts.

Since I can't (actually, don't know how to) embed scope photos in this review, all I can do is verbally describe my observations. My tests are far from extensive, but they will give you a good idea of how much power these drives draw, and when they draw it.

* When the drive is just sitting there, doing nothing but spinning, the +12V current drain is 0.24A and the +5V drain is 0.13A. That totals 4.2 watts of power during idle. I have not measured earlier, high-power drives, but I'm willing to bet the Caviar Greens draw at most half the power of traditional hard drives. I would not be surprised if it were 1/3 the power.

* If you shut off one voltage, the other supply stops drawing all power. It's a convenient way to power the drives on and off. I would suggest power cycling the +5V rail as the circuitry to shut off the +5V supply with a simple PFET is simpler than that for the +12V rail.

* When the drives are first powered up, +5V draws an almost constant 500-600 mA. +12V current is a ramp, starting at 200 mA and works its way up to 600 mA after about 10 seconds, when the drive is then up to speed. At this point, the +12V peak current drops down to idle spinning) current of 0.24A. It does not vary much after this, regardless of disk activity (erase, write, read, etc.). On the other hand, the +5V supply current gets busy. It's pretty clear that the head servo is driven from the +5V supply and not the +12V supply. It's hard to verbally describe the +5V current, but I would say the average current during head movement activity is about 400 mA. When there is no activity, the +5V current is about 0.13A. When the drive is done doing what it is doing, then it drops into the 4.2W idle power mode that I mentioned above. If you are a power supply designer, you should be aware that these DC currents I cite are averages, and that you have a "hash" of AC currents that result in the average values I list. The +5V current has a hash of about 300mA p-p, and the +12V current hash is maybe 400mA p-p.

* I have never succeeded in getting OSX to put the drives to sleep. I've tried all the utilities in the Mac universe (SpinDown, Cocktail), but no matter what you do, the drives never want to got to sleep, at least for me. If WD puts out a utility for the PC, they certainly offer no support for OSX. Even if you properly eject the drives from the desktop, they sit there spinning and drawing 4.2W. Hardly seems "fully green" to me.

* During the idle mode, my infrared thermometer measures a case temperature rise of 12 degrees C, which is a pretty low number. UL safety limits for human hand touch temperatures are usually between 50-55 degree C -- you'll begin to pull your hand back at that temperature range. So if the drive is 12 degrees above ambient, and you are sitting at normal room temperatures (25 degrees), then your drive temperature is only about 37 degrees (98.6 degrees F, just like a human!). This explains why people are reporting that the drive "feels pretty cool." As these things go, they do indeed run quite cool.

Here's hoping that some of you more technically-inclined customers out there find this data useful.

I purchased these drives to create a RAID 5 setup for home storage, turns out these drives have terrible characteristics for RAID because of the "Green" firmware. If you are using these drives as stand-alone drives everything should be fine, if you are looking to put together a RAID (software or hardware) look somewhere else, there are plenty of consumer-grade drives that work well with RAID.

I've bought six of these. They are quiet. After many hours, they are barely warm to the touch. Every other hard-disk drive made can be used as a space heater.

They are a bit slower, adding about 33% to the seek time, but nothing noticeable to data reads. This only matters when reading lots of small files like during boot-up. I use an Intel SSD for my main drive and one of these for data. It is the best of both worlds.

I've found that most computers recognize these drives but must be told to mount them, format them, and assign them a drive letter. (This only needs to be done once.) This is a problem with large drives, not with these specifically. For true ease of setup, get a 1TB drive.

I bought two of these to go into my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (I immediately updated the firmware on the ReadyNAS to support the drives, so that wasn't an issue). The drives were quiet, but I noticed a faint clicking sound on occasion. After a bit of research, I discovered that the sound was from the heads "parking" frequently. After only three days of use, drive #1 had done this over 4,000 times ("Load Cycle Count" per SMART data), and the drives are rated for a lifetime of 300,000. I ran WD's "wdidle3" from their Web site, and the parking has stopped on both drives.

Other than the needless head parking, these are nice drives, especially for only $89.99 each (when I ordered them). I recommend these drives, but make sure you put wdidle3.exe on a bootable flash drive with DOS on it (Google for more information) and run "wdidle3 /D" to disable the head parking. If you would like to conserve some energy, let your OS spin the drive(s) down.

I'm a software engineer and I have enormous archives of data. I currently have more than fifty drives on the shelf behind me, totaling about 20 terabytes of data.

For the last two years, I've used almost exclusively the Western Digital Green drives. Perhaps a half dozen each of the 750gb, 1tb, 1.5tb drives. They've been fantastic for data storage.

When the 2tb version reached the right price point, I ordered a couple of those. I was aware of the issues with sector size, detection, and formatting in Windows, but I use Solaris, Linux, and OSX almost exclusively. These drives were being used in OSX, which does have support for these drives.

However, when I plugged both drives in, I had a hell of a time formatting them through the Disk Utility and had to do it manually on the command line.

The real problems began after the drives were formatted and I had moved a ton of data to them. On one of the drives, I renamed a folder which contained about 1.25tb of data. Instantly, the folder disappeared and the drive appeared empty. That's right. I renamed the folder all my data was in and that magically deleted all my content.

Upon closer inspection, the data was still there - it just didn't appear in the file system. Thankfully, I was able to recover the data with some command-line-fu. I then reformatted the drive and gave it a torture test until the time I had to get these back in the box to return to Amazon before the refund period expired. I found boh of the drives to be questionable, but the one drive above to be particularly bad. It could have been just a bad drive or it could be a consistent problem across all of the 2tb WD Greens. My test sample (two drives) isn't adequate to extrapolate.

I will say that the experience was enough to drive me away from the 2tb version. I've instead gone back to buying the 1.5tb WD Greens and replaced both 2tb drives with three of those.

I don't believe the EARS vs EADS version has anything to do with it as I've been using the 1.5tb versions for a long time now and that includes both EARS and EADS drives. They have been stable and I have never had any issues with them.

I've had good experiences until recently with Western Digital's drives, but I'm too gun-shy from the latest experience to try their 2tb drives again any time soon. Back to the trusty 1.5tbs.

Update: I wrote this review the first week of June and as of the second week of August, I have been running a few 2tb WD EARS drives exclusively in a pair of Drobos (as I mention in further replies to this review, the company behind Drobo sell exclusively WD green drives to meet thermal and power needs for their devices). I've had four 2tb WD EARS running in a single Drobo for more than a month now without any of the problems that I experienced on the other 2TB WD EARS that I used. I'm not sure if this is due to how the Drobo interfaces with and utilizes the drives (and compensates for the slow response times, perhaps?) or if there has been some improvement in newer productions of the drive, or if some of us just had a bad batch (the newest drives were purchased from another leading online tech retailer. Think chicken reproduction...).

At any rate, I am not sure I'll trust these drives directly in a system or as attached storage other than part of a dedicated Drobo-type system. They may be fine for that use (as I've said before, I can only comment on my personal experiences and observed experiences of other people with this drive), but I'm not willing to risk it since we're talking about large amounts of data.

My continued advice based on my latest experiences are that you should still consider these drives, but ONLY if you are aware of and willing ot accept the possibility that you may have to deal with returning/exchanging/replacing your drives. As always, Amazon treats customers very well when they have problems with products -- so as long as you can take the time and effort to do that if you encounter severe drive issues with these, then perhaps the nice price on these will be worth it.

I purchased a new Western Digital 1.50 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache WD15EARS hard drive from Amazon on 11/20/2010. The drive is good to go out of the box. It is quiet, runs cool to the touch, and it is fast. I also purchased a Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station and I use the eSATA connection on my ASUS N61JV-X2 notebook PC which I purchased from Amazon as well running Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. In my configuration, I decided to encrypt the Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive using Microsoft BitLocker using a very strong password that changes every 30 days.

I use this new hard drive to store HDTV TV shows that I recorded live from Microsoft Windows Media Center and my AverMedia AverTV Hybrid Volar MAX USB TV Tuner stick. I also store my Apple iTunes library and my 1,050 CD collection using Apple Lossless encoding. Lastly, I keep a copy of my most critical data and software applications repository on the drive as well.

There have been no problems whatsoever with the hard drive or the hard drive docking station through USB 2.0 or eSATA connection. The Western Digital Caviar Green SATA hard drive and Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station are excellent choices that provide for an unlimited amount of storage capacity at a low cost. I intend on purchasing more of the same hard drives in the near future as my storage needs continue to grow.

Update:

I contacted both Western Digital and Thermaltake technical support within the United States to inquire about more information. Thermaltake requires that their BlacX hard drive dock utilize the eSATA connection exclusively with Western Digital hard drives that require the newer Advanced Format 4k hard drive sectors especially if the maximum storage capacity exceeds 1.00 TB. Furthermore, they require that the hard drive docking unit be turned off during boot up, restart, or shut down phases within the Microsoft Windows 7 64 bit environment. SATA must be set to ACHI mode within the BIOS to utilize this hard drive properly. After I ran the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows software application, the WD15EARS passed the S.M.A.R.T. test on multiple occasions. Microsoft's chkdsk utility revealed no problems. Utilizing Microsoft BitLocker drive encryption took several hours to complete.

This hard drive is extremely quiet and it gets as warm as body temperature under peak operational conditions. I plan on running additional stress tests for the next three months before I transfer or store any critical data on it given the atrocious reviews written by other purchasers or owners of this exact hard drive. This is my first Western Digital hard drive after I purchased an external Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.50 TB hard drive with a USB 2.0 interface. It was much noisier and it ran hotter which caused consternation for me about its longevity and reliability.

As long as your computer and operating system are relatively new and you use this hard drive as a standalone unit, it represents the best balance among price, speed, storage capacity, and reliability on the market as of 11/25/2010.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I recently replaced four Western Digital 1 TB green drives in a Synology 409 NAS (RAID 5) with WD20EARS drives. 3 were purchaased from Amazon (the order limit) and 1 from elsewhere. All drives arrived in excellent packaging and passed all preliminary tests.

They are the newer 00MVWB0 version with 3 x 667 GB platters instead of the 4 x 500 TB platters used by the older versions. They were all manufactured in Malaysia less than 2 months earlier.

Using Synology's instructions the RAID 5 was expanded from 2.7 TB to 5.4 TB over a 2 day period. The process was simple and no problems were encountered. No data was lost and all drives passed the SMART tests. The drives are currently operating between 31 to 37 C degrees.

The NAS is being used to stream audio/video to an entertainment center. On an average day the NAS is accessed only occasionally but then streaming lasts for a few hours each time. Under these circumstances both the WD 1 TB green drives (for over a year) and the WD20EARS (for a week so far) have performed flawlessly. My experience with these drives so far clearly calls for 5 stars. I will update this review if there is any change in status.

Update 3/21/2011: The drives continue to operate without any problems after almost 5 months of continuous operations.

Update 10/30/2011: The drives continue to operate without any problems after over 1 year of continuous operations.

If you are using a Linux based system, this drive requires the use of wdidle3! The green series on any linux based system, NAS, server etc. requires a change in the Landing count. Google it. The drive will park itself thousands of times in a very short time greatly reducing operating life. I have these drives in a synology NAS linux based. Due to the green nature of this drive it parks itself within 7 seconds of non-use. In a RAID or NAS this is bad! My drives recorded 27,000 parks and starts in less than a month!!! SO my drives are one year closer to dying than if installed in WINDOWS!

WD makes no notice of this and still have not returned my emails for support!

I bought this drive for the 4th bay on my Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10 which is attached to a 24" iMac. I have the other three bays filled with Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EADS and have had them about a year and they've worked perfectly. They run very cool and quiet (you have to put your ear right against Drobo to hear them) resulting in Drobo's fan hardly ever having to kick on. The fan on Drobo is louder than the drives.

Note to Drobo Owners: You will need to update your firmware for Drobo to version 1.3.6 if you haven't already. The new update supports the new 4kb sectors (advanced format). And you must update Drobo dashboard FIRST to version 1.6.8 before updating the firmware.

I am a photographer shooting with and Canon EOS 5D Mark II which creates giant files right out of the camera (20-25MB each), so the space is nice. Since I am using it primarily for storage, speed isn't a big concern. People who really need speed should check out Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD2001FASS but it comes at a much higher price point.

The packaging was excellent. A large outer box, and inside was a smaller box surrounded by air pillows. Opening the smaller box you find the drive suspended by two feet cushions. All 4 of the drives I've ordered from Amazon have come this way and I really appreciate it Maybe I'm just lucky. It's too early to tell how long the drive will last. Having a 3 year warranty from Western Digital help with peace of mind. Once it's time to expand Drobo again, I'll will be buying another Caviar Green but by then we'll be up to 4TB drives.

WD has specifically engineered this drive so that it doesn't work well in RAID environments by disabling the TLER firmware instruction.

For standalone use drive is quite good.