Отзывы о Жесткий диск Western Digital 1.5 ТБ WD Caviar Green 1,5 TB (WD15EARX)
506 отзывов пользователей o Western Digital 1.5 ТБ WD Caviar Green 1,5 TB (WD15EARX)
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Western Digital 1.5 ТБ WD Caviar Green 1,5 TB?
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Валитов Рустам
03.10.2011
6/10
Оценка пользователя
Плохо
- + Недорогой, тихий.
- - После 3х недель работы начались следующие проблемы, Ось (Windows 7 x64 Ultimate) загружается с 3 раза. Либо курсор мигает в углу, либо выдает ошибку. При...
Логунов Вадим
29.08.2011
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
- + Тихий, почти не грееться (средняя темпрертура 30-35). дольно таки быстрый до 100мб/сек, для файловой свалки самое...
Скроменый эксперт
13.01.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
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 belowThis 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) interfaceI'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 pr
Скроменый эксперт
21.02.2013
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
I have 2 computers backed up by a 2nd generation 1TB Time Capsule, and there was hardly enough room for all the backups. After doing much forum reading regarding changing out drives, I settled on this 2TB WD model (after first ordering and returning a Seagate, which some have found has firmware incompatibility problems affecting the fan). Apple uses Western Digital drives: indeed, this one was shipped from Apple, which was a good sign it would work without effecting either the fan on/off or other firmware dependent issues. (I replaced the original, still good 1TB Western Digital for the larger 2TB, and now use the original WD 1TB mounted in an OWC external case as a spare backup.)A problem with many, especially, 1st and 2nd generation Time Capsules has been internal power supply over-heating caused by bad placement of the fan and the lack of sufficient ventilation holes covered by the gray rubber on the unit's bottom. Indeed, both top and bottom of the TC's case, particularly, at the back where the cable plugs are, Could be almost too hot to touch. Most Time Capsule fail because of 3 burned out capacitors in the power supply. While these can be changed, the repair is tedious because of all the plastic 'goop' slathered over the solder connections and capacitors. Moreover, without fan replacement or, best, moving the power supply outside the case, another heat-caused failure will likely occur within 2 years. But the replacement WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EARX runs cooler than the original did.Still, my next step will be to replace the internal power supply with an external supply, such as a 5v,12v, 2-3 amp 'power brick' supply used on many hard drives (e.g., LaCie Power Supply). And, perhaps a fan placement mod, though with an external power supply, I may just eliminate the fan. Meanwhile, after installing the new WD 2TB drive, I have left the gray rubber bottom cover off and, to enhance heat transfer away from the TC's interior, placed the unit on a 3/4" tall finned aluminum heat sink I bought from ebay, finned side down, the flat side in total contact with the TC's aluminum bottom. One could use heat transfer silicone for better contact. It definitely runs significantly cooler now.The best source of information for fixing Time Capsules - power supply and fan mod - can be found on-line by searching: 'LaPastenague', a free, step-by-step source of information regarding fixing Time Capsules with numerous links to other technicians (I am not connected in any way to these sites). With a good fan mod or removing power supply to outside, the Time Capsule will run at about 36 degrees C rather than the usual 43 degrees C. The nice thing about Amazon is that I managed to source almost all materials I needed for this project, and at the best prices!
Скроменый эксперт
10.07.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
I placed the order for the WD20EARX, but wound up with the latest WD 2 TB Green Edition. Western Digital must have made some revisions on their "Green Edition", At least they got this Green Edition to SPEED UP (WD - as in WD-40 added to it? HMMM?). I had been debating if I should had gotten the WD Black Edition but upon reading how WD Green Edition had been revamped; I thought I would give it a shot. Having both Seagates and Western Digitals in my OS Bays. This one isn't too bad at all, but the speed could be ramped up just a little bit more, but one can rightfully say they did speed it up though. The best thing about this Green is that you have the option to turn the Energy Mode off if so would like and go full steam ahead or balance it out or whatever floats your boat in the BIOS (if your BIOS has that functionality). Depending on your mainboard, processor, and so forth - everything plays a critical factor here because one small error can wreck havoc on everything including burn-out your mainboard and ruining everything else; for you want everything to be in synchronization.As far as benchmarking goes - it is running exactly the way I have it configured in BIOS, no sharp spiking nor dropping - just even and mellow and in sync with everything else in the bays.Operating System (OS):Windows 7 Ultimate - 64 bitWhat's Inside:with 8 bays (1 WD - 2 TB, 2 WD - 1 TB, 2 Seagates - 1 TB, 1 WD - 500 GB, 1 Seagate - 500 GB, 1 Seagate - 750 GB - all are HDD (Internal Hard Drives)...)1.0, 2.0 (normal), 2.0 (fast), 3.0 USB ports plus firewire, HDMI, etc.External: 2 - 500 GB Seagate Portable, 3 TB WDMainboard: MSI (Micro-Star International) Gold - Military - III (March 2012) - 6 SatasDDR3 - 6 slotsAMD Cross-Fire Black (Core)x6 4.32 GhzProcessor is RadeonInstalled NVIDIA GRAPHIC CARD 620 (needs to upgrade) and runs on NVIDIA and not Radeon.PCI Express (2 Satas) - currently used for fansCooler Master Tower with 9 120 Cooler Master Fans Cooler Master Computer Case Cooling R4-L2R-20AC-GP (two Cooler Master 120 fans are black (old version) from my previous OS) with Cooler Master Power Supply===========================Latency:Running on 1.0 Gbps - EthernetBenchmarking: On the WD Green Caviar Only:5580.98 Mbps - Up6890.23 Mbps - DownNot much difference in comparison with the Benchmarking of the entire OS as a whole as I had configuredthis in BIOS:4890.11 Mbps - Up5999.01 Mbps - DownSo the Latency difference on the 2 TB WD Green is pretty good overall and yes, I do have it in RAIDmode so the other various drives on in either mirrored or striped or simple volume; a mix and matchfor data reasons.If this is of any assistance?=================Updated Addendum - some of the HDD (internal) are from the previous OS or what I had in storage thatwere added to the drive bays - all were formatted ... for your information; the newer Terabytes arethe newer ones. On the external - the WB 3 TB is old version, 1 Seagate 500 GB is the first edition,(7 months old) and the other is newer - it can be found on my reviews along with Cooler Master Informationif you clicked on my reviews; as for the Processor - that version is no longer available, they onlycome now in either x4 or x8 Cores - I am still trying to find the one for x6 as I had changed theProcessor when I installed this WD 2 TB from the original review on the Cooler Master Info - as notto confuse anyone - so there were changes made from just awhile ago.
Скроменый эксперт
23.06.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
I bought 2-3TB drives for my Synology NAS Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS212j (White). I've only had the drives on for one day but after reading about all the drives that fail after a few months it seems the problem is the head parking itself every 8 seconds if no disk activity. The only reason it does this is to try to save power. Each park results in a load/unload cycle. Most modern drives are rated around 600,000 cycles. Depending on how your system uses the drive, your drive should only have 10-200 cycles per day, but some these Western Digital drives are reporting 3000-5000 cycles per day. This will surpass the 600,000 cycle limit in a few months. You can get the cycles from S.M.A.R.T. or from third party software. Think of starting your car and turning if off every minute, 24 hours a day. Your starter would only last a month or so and then fail instead of lasting for years.The first thing I did with my new drives was to run the WDIDLE3.EXE utility on them to disable the 8 second head parking. You can also change the head parking to something like 5 minutes, which would make a lot more sense than 8 seconds. To use this utility, you have to run it from a boot disk at the command line. This means you have make a cd/dvd/floppy that you boot from and get a command line prompt such as A:\. At the A:\ prompt type in WDIDLE3 /r to get the current setting (mine said "Idle3 Timer is enabled and set to 8.000 seconds"). After I ran WDIDLE3 /d to disable the timer it said "Idle3 Timer is disabled." You could also run WDIDLE3 /S300 to set the park time to 5 minutes. I disabled mine because most, if not all, operating systems already have options to shut down hard drives after so many minutes.Google WDIDLE3 to research for yourself (one site is [...]). I don't think this utility is still supported, so use at your own risk. That said, I haven't read about any cases of this utility damaging hard drives. The hard part is making a boot disk with this utility on it and booting into it. I can't write up how to do this (do your google) but I will say on most machines you do not have to go into the bios and change your boot order. Just continuously press the F8 key (Windows) when booting and you should get a menu of which drive you want to boot from.In a last, unrelated note, it seems you can run these drives in RAID mode even though WD says you shouldn't and wants you to buy their Enterprise models that cost more. From my research, the TLER setting is only applicable to certain RAID configurations and then only if you have hardware controlling the RAID. Most consumers and small business will have RAID controlled in their software, so TLER should be off (as it is in these drives), but if you do have a hardware RAID controller you may want consider other drives that support TLER. If you want to try experimenting with the TLER settings, there is a WDTLER utility available.Finally, if anyone has corrections or additional information please leave a comment.Bert
Скроменый эксперт
12.05.2012
2/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
Unlike most of the positive reviews, I have owned a few of these drives for around 2 years now. For most of them, they seemed fine during the first few months. So in my mind any review where the drive is less than 3+ months old is not really valid.I have not had any of the green drives I own survive more than about a year or a year and half at most. Out of the 7 I now own, I have replaced all of them once. And I think I have to replace a replacement now as well.If you're willing to risk the data you put on these drive getting corrupted, then you can save a few dollars but so far I have yet to have one of the green drives not die before the warranty expired.If you think "hey it's under warranty, so no big deal" then you're not thinking it all the way through.Having to replace a drive means losing files or data as well. It's not like replacing a video card or other component. You lose more than just time when a drive fails.And there was no advanced warning of a failure on any of the drives. I only found out that a drive was starting to fail when I started seeing problems with files getting corrupted and the OS telling me that I had to do a file system check on the drive.The replacement drives are not new drives. They are all re-certified drives. Which means they were all sent back as damaged and maybe WD fixed something before shipping it back out.I originally started out with 4 drives at once to put in to a RAID device. I thought that since it was raid 5, it wouldn't hurt if a drive died. Well what happened was 2 drives started corrupting data at about the same time. Which meant the problem was not recoverable. RAID 5 can survive a single drive failure at a time but not 2. To make the situation worse, the drives didn't start by dying completely. The 2 drives started out by corrupting data in small enough amounts that it was no immediately noticeable. So once I knew there was a real problem around 5-10% of the 3TB of data had scattered amounts of corrupt files. I was able to copy most of the files off the array. Unfortunately because of the corruption I had to trash about 50% of the files because parts of groups of files were corrupted which meant the whole group of files was useless. For example some of the music albums I purchases had a few songs that were bad. So it meant each of those albums was essentially ruined. Most of that was replaceable at least, but for a lot of things there was no other source for the files. And there wasn't a back up because it was a RAID5 array and was not supposed to need a backup because what are the odds of having 2 drives fail at the same time?Since then I've been running the drives in mirrored pairs and even that has really helped at least when they are relying on win7 drive mirroring. windows doesn't seem keep track of which drive is primary and which is the copy or something so if either drive starts to corrupt data, windows spends days "re-synching" the drives and the net result is that some files end up being corrupted.
Скроменый эксперт
28.11.2012
8/10
Оценка пользователя
Хорошо
Overall this is a very good drive. Reasonably fast, quiet, and a very good price in terms of $ per gigabyte. My only complaint is something other potential purchasers should be aware of on THIS AND ANY OTHER DRIVE LARGER THAN 2.2TB in size. Unfortunately "MBR" (Master Boot Record), the venerable tried and true method of partitioning hard drives is limited to partitioning drives no larger than 2.2TB in size. Using MBR to partition this or any other drive in excess of 2.2TB will work, but will result in the drive space in excess of the 2.2TB limit becoming unusable. On this particular drive, by the time differing size calculation methods and system reserve space is taking into account, I paid for approximately 250gb of storage space that I could not initially access.Fortunately Windows (in my case Windows 7) has a built in solution for partitioning drives larger in size than 2.2TB. It is called "GPT" (or GUID Partition Table) and it represents the updated replacement for the "MBR" partitioning method. "GPT" appears as an available partitioning option when using the Windows disk management tool (and I am sure many other 3rd party partitioning tools).All well and good? Not quite. There is another catch. While the "GPT" partitioning method can be read from and written to by virtually any modern motherboard, you will not be able to use a "GPT" partitioned disk as a BOOT DISK unless the motherboard firmware specifically supports it. At the time of this writing (11/12) the vast majority of motherboards currently in use, plus a large number of "modern" motherboards currently for sale here on Amazon (as well as all other retailers) are still based on some form of PC BIOS (Basic Input Output System) and inherently cannot support a "GPT" partitioned disk as a boot drive. To boot from a GPT partitioned disk the motherboard must be using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) as it's control firmware. As time progresses UEFI will become the standard for motherboard control firmware, but for the time being... be aware of buying this or any other hard drive that exceeds 2.2TB in size if your intention is to use it as your system boot drive.
Скроменый эксперт
08.11.2011
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
I purchased two of these drives in September 2011, and I could not be happier with them. I have great luck overall with Western Digital disks, and these drives are no exception. One was purchased here on Amazon, and another was purchased at a local electronics shop. Both have not given me any problems.The rotational speed of the drive is, for some, a limiting factor in its deployment settings. I have both disks installed in an old 2003-era Power Mac G4 tower, connected to two Sonnet TSATA PCI cards, and when formatted correctly, work very well and recognize their full capacity in my setup. Due to the space limitations of the older Apple Partition Map (APM) formatting scheme, they must be configured as GPT (GUID Partition Table) and therefore cannot be used to boot the computer, even though the Sonnet SATA cards do support booting to connected drives. I use smaller SATA disks (2TB and under) for booting purposes since they can be properly formatted using APM.Running in OS X 10.5.8, the drives recognize all 2.7TB of formatted capacity, and do a very admirable job of acting as my data repository. If I recall correctly, RAID is not recommended with this model 'Green' drive due to the power saving logic, so I use a program to copy, every 6 hours, from the primary storage disk, to the other. This has the added benefit of avoiding filesystem corruption if one drive starts to go south. Luckily, that is not the case.Performance for copying over 1TB of data from the old SATA disk to the WD 3TB green drive seemed pretty close to the 1.5Gbps interface speed of the SATA card, which was simply amazing on this old G4 tower. I don't regularly access the machine, and most file transfer is done over my home network, so the disks aren't used as primary storage. The speed, though, is not noticeably slower than the other 7200RPM SATA disks (one Seagate 1TB and one Hitachi 2TB) I have installed in the machine. This phenomenon is likely due to the SATA 1.5Gbps interface of the card being the primary bottleneck, not the rotational speed of any of the disks involved. I have not run any quantitative speed testing on any of the disks as I have not noticed any issues with performance in my current setup.I am very happy with these disks and their compatibility with my old, creaking setup. I feel good knowing that if the G4 tower ever goes south, I can readily move them into a Mac Pro tower with ease. I was skeptical that investing in a SATA setup for my old machine would be worth the cost. I now believe that for its purpose as a local network storage device, and not as a daily use machine, these drives are probably among the best for this kind of setup regardless of the platform you'll be deploying on (assuming your setup with work with 3TB disks).One note is that (as of early November 2011) the prices of the 3TB Green drives have more than doubled since I purchased them, likely due to flooding in Thailand where most hard disks are produced these days. It may seem vulgar or insensitive to discuss storage pricing when so many peoples' lives are devastated by this horrible disaster, but this is a product review, so I mention it with as much context as I can. I could not personally justify a purchase at the current price level, but if you need 3TB of storage in one disk mechanism, I believe you can acquire this drive with confidence assuming the cost does not prevent you from doing so.
Скроменый эксперт
24.10.2012
4/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
I run a communications and information technology business out of my home and use the Caviar Green 3TB as a data drive in my main desktop PC, and despite it not being the primary drive, its slow access speeds, incessant need to move into power-saving mode (even when directed not to by the OS), and high failure rate make it an excruciating drive for home businesses that need to access data regularly.I bought the Green to be more environmental by using less power (plus the lower price for the capacity was nice). I need my machine to run fast which is why the Green is relegated only to data duties with a high-performance SSD dutifully carrying the heavy lifting of apps and OS, however, when I'm accessing tens (not hundreds or thousands) of 14MP images from my data drive while playing MP3s in the background, the Caviar Green falls painfully short. I don't consider myself a crazy power-user, but the drive acts like I am - slowing to a crawl when opening too many documents at a time. At times, the entire computer will stall as I listen to the Green slowly spin up. Again, this is after setting the system to never shut down the hard drives or power-save in any way (at least not without 30 minutes of inactivity first).In addition to performance issues, I've had to replace it four times - as it begins to fail consistently every 3-5 months - developing the dreaded "drive clicking noise." I have nothing but good things to say about Western Digital's exemplary customer support and advance RMA process, but returning the drive repeatedly isn't fun.Overall, I will remain a Western Digital customer, but I'm looking at getting the heck out of the Green as soon as possible. I would only recommend this drive for NAS setups or maybe situations where users are performing single-duty tasks at a time (no multi-tasking on this puppy).As for my system specs, here's the general breakdown so you can see how the Green is the bottleneck:* Intel i7-2600 (Sandy Bridge) 3.4GHz* RAM: Crucial Ballistix 16GB PC-12400* GPU: eVGA GTX 660Ti 2GB* App Drive: Crucial 128GB SATA-3 (6.0Gbs) SSD* Data Drive: Western Digital Green 3TB
Скроменый эксперт
06.01.2013
4/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
I will not buy any other brand of hard drive. I have in excess of 20 hard drives that I have bought over the past 15 years. All of them are Western Digital. Even the 10.1gb drive that was my first, 15 years ago, is still working.I have bought 4 of these "green" drives over the last two years and one of them is already dead. I didn't even use it regularly. It was just used for backup and to store files to be moved from one drive to another.These 5400rpm drives are worse than going out and buying a black and white TV. And worse than that, my 12-15 year old 5200rpm drives still work, even after using them constantly to run my computer over the years. These green drives are slow to access and move data but are fast to go to "sleep", even in the middle of trying to defrag them. I had to leave an audio file playing over and over in a loop just to keep it from going to sleep in the middle of a defrag.Sure they run cooler but at a very high price. Life expectancy is much more important than cool to me. I would much rather suck up a whole 5 watts of power and have my computer working properly than to be "green" and have worthless machine. The day I cannot afford to spend 20 cents a month to run a decent hard drive, I will throw my computer away. I don't live in 1999 anymore and I don't want a computer that functions like I do. If you do, this is the drive for you.I will not buy anymore of these at any price. The 7200rpm drives are only a few dollars more than these anyway. No more data loss for me. I am sticking with the better drives from now on.By the way I do have and highly recommend the My Book Studio II drives. They are also called green drives but they are 7200rpm. They work great and function exactly like any other 7200rpm Western Digital drive. None of the problems that I have had with these 5200rpm drives.
Скроменый эксперт
08.11.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
First, much thanks to "Jerry Van De Beek" for the following tip! That is, to "convert the 3TB HDD (Hard-Disc-Drive) to a GPT disk in Disk management" was very helpful. However, I wanted to make a client's 3TB into an external drive to replace an older similar version in 1TB. After experimenting for a while, I figured it out. First, your GPT tip got me started as I was able to convert from "Dynamic Disc" / "MBR Disc" to "GPT Disc," which allowed me to merge the drive into a single large 2.72TB after formatting as opposed to two or three smaller hard-drives (Dynamic/MBR mode). I then had to allocate and create a "Primary Disc Drive" with all options to format or assign a drive letter UNCHECKED (Important step). After doing this via a [Vantec CB-ISATAU2 SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter Supports 2.5-Inch, 3.5-Inch, 5.25-Inch Hard Disk Drives (Black) by Vantec; "you may find this awesome device on Amazon as indicated above, which lets you connect virtually any type of hard-disc-drive or CD-ROM/DVD/Blue-Ray drive externally to any computer/laptop via a basic USB/SATA connector etc...great in the case of mounting/unmounting/restoring crashed computer/laptop systems as you are granted instant access to any Primary or Logical drives as though it were a basic data drive"]. Next, after creating an identifiable "healthy primary partition," I unplugged the 3TB HDD from the Vantec adapter and proceeded to connect to an external fan-less aluminum self-cooling casing. Voila!! There it was, finally, the external casing could identify the full 3TB (2.72TB formatted) HDD and all is well...now backing-up/restoring a client's HDD (moving all 1TB' worth of data to the newer 3TB, which could take days or weeks to complete...who knows for sure?).
Скроменый эксперт
04.05.2012
4/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
As an IT tech with 30 years of experience in computers (both from a hardware and software point of view), I'm someone who actually does know what I'm doing. I've seen other brands of hard drives and know that all of them do, on occasion, fail. It's called a "burn in" failure when it happens in the first few months of a devices use.In the case of this drive - the Caviar Green 2 TB desktop computer drive - it had a burn-in failure.It was put into a 3 year old Windows XP system as the primary back-up drive. I have about 1 TB of stuff that is backed up and needed a large drive to clone my other two 1 TB drives every week (I run a business, and need the back-ups weekly). The time it was taking to backup to an external hard drive was way too long (on the order of eight to ten hours in total for both drives), so I got this to put inside the case and increase the speed - which it did for about a week. The speed of backing up the first week was cut by two thirds. I was quite pleased.The drive was not accessed for another week (it's only a back-up drive, after all), but the next week, the back-up took 16 hours for the first of my drives. It never backed up the second. The Western Digital tools indicated it had multiple bad sectors.My experience with Western Digitals has been generally very good. The failure rate is in keeping with the opinions posted here at Amazon in that they fail about 10-15% of the time. Other drives are somewhat worse insofar as staying up and longevity goes, so this is actually better than average. No drive is perfect. This is the first time I had one with a burn-in failure. Western Digital's warranty and return policies are excellent, though, and although I RMA'd this drive to them on Monday, I'm getting the replacement five days later.The replacement will dictate whether I update this with a higher rating or lower one. Hard drive models do tend to have track records - often either very good or very bad. In playing the odds, I expect the replacement to be exactly what I expected - a large, fast hard drive that suits my needs. If it, too, fails, then I will be revamping my opinion.(In an aside, it arrived just as I finished typing "opinion" above. I'll revisit and update this review in another couple of months.)
Скроменый эксперт
23.02.2013
8/10
Оценка пользователя
Хорошо
I purchased this to fill the fourth bay in my Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 (RNDU4000) network attached storage: It is on Netgear's approved product list. It was instantly recognized by the NAS and was effortlessly expanded into the existing storage volume. It has been on about 40% of the time since Oct 2012 and I have experienced no problems with it. It runs silently to my ear--the NAS cooling fan is far louder than any of the 4 Western Digital drives in the NAS. I will buy more as the market price decreases.Warning: Western Digital advises against using these drives in Network Attached Storage devices. Because these are "green" drives, they are designed to idle park the read head after a short period of time (currently after 8 seconds of inactivity). This units and can result in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Load Cycle Counts in Netgear's ReadyNAS units. Keep an eye on your hard drive's SMART statistics if using this drive in a NAS. There are some workarounds in Netgear's ReadyNAS forums for those dealing with a high Load Cycle Count and Western Digital offers software program (WDIDLE3) that can be used (against Warranty, I think) to set the idle timer to a longer period.
Скроменый эксперт
20.05.2012
6/10
Оценка пользователя
Плохо
I have 12 or 13 of these drives, bought when the prices were very low just before the Thai floods. If you buy one of these make sure you download and run the WDIDE3.exe from Western Digital to disable the 8 second default for head parking. The wear and tear this causes on the drive mercilessly shortens the life of the drive. Google it and you will find plenty of stories on this. Surprised no class action suit yet for this bad engineering decision. I suspect someone in marketing got their way over the engineers just to make the drives power consumption look better. At least the engineers were good enough to provide an official tool so those in the know (meaning you now you have read this) can fix a very bad design decision.All modern OS's spin down the drives and it is better to allow BSD, Ubuntu, Windows or what ever else you are using to power down the drives in line with the OS's requirements rather than let the hardware do it, incessantly in this case. It's more than just a theoretical issue. I lost a ZFS RAID when one of four of these drives failed and system logs showed the redundant data had not been written correctly across the drives and pointed to the head parking issue timing it out. I had NO DATA LOSS as I understand a RAID is not back up, so I always have a set of back ups of all my data, however if you are using these drives in a small RAID NAS box in your home please take heed and always have a back up somewhere and do not rely on your NAS being sufficient. Please be paranoid when you deal with your data.Anyway, my replacement drive for the above RAID was DOA. Another 4 weeks and I got a working one. Applied WDIDE3 to disable the 8 second shut down and have had no issues since.The 5400rpm speed of the drive is not an issue and keeps it cooler than a 7200 drive so no issues there either.RATING: Would give it a 5 star review but lost a star for the 8 second head park design decision, and knocked off another star because even though production has been restored to pre-flood levels the price has been kept inflated when it could be dropped down to the pre-flood rate easy enough now.
Скроменый эксперт
18.06.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
This is my 3rd WD Green drive and by far the largest and fastest out of the 3. When I built my HTPC I put in a 1.5tb Sata II Green drive and quickly ran out of space so I added another Sata II 2tb Green drive. They have been running without incident for a little over 2 years 24/7. Copying from drive to drive with Sata II I am averaging about 50-60MB/s with bursting up to 100MB/s. This is with large movie files, smaller files like MP3's and also transferring to/from my boot drive which is a very fast SSD. When those drives were getting close to full I decided that I would get the biggest drives available and probably phase the smaller drives out.Enter the WD30EZRX. It was $5 more for the Sata III version of the 3tb drives so I figured I would give it a shot even though I was not expecting it to be any faster than my older drives. The box arrived quickly and was packaged in Amazon's *Frustration Free* packaging. Being it was an OEM drive there was not a SATA cable included but this didn't matter as I had a spare. I opened up my HTPC and plugged the drive into my SATA III port and gave it power. Upon boot it was immediately noticed by the PC. Once in windows I formatted the drive as GPT and it has been working great ever since. Please note that unless you have an EFI Bios you must format at GPT or your PC will not recognize the full 3TB.Surprisingly this drive is much faster than the older Green drives I have. Copying to and from the SSD and the older drives in my machine I average about 100MB/s with up to 150MB/s bursts compared to the 60MB/s of the older drives. It is quite noticable when copying around large files so the speed increase is a nice bonus!This drive has now been running 24/7 for a little over a month and it is still going strong. I have owned many WD drives in the last 25 years and they have been rock solid so I will be sure to modify this review if I have any trouble. I highly recommend this drive and will be buying a few more in the coming months!
Скроменый эксперт
23.09.2012
2/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
This review is for the wd30ezrx 3T drive.I have had many drives from western digital, seagate, IBM, and Hitachi over the years. My failure rate has been low for all of them because I always condition my power and keep the drives cool.I've had 2 drives bad out of the box when WD was going from 512 to 4k sectors but until now I have never had a western digital drive go bad in warranty that was working when it arrived.I bought this drive in June 2012. I used it as a backup drive nightly. It was on a Sata3 port and mounted right next to the cooling fan.Yesterday while I was copying some files it gave and error and stopped. It wasn't even visible in disk manager.After a little research, it seems that firmware problems are famous with Western Digital WD30EZRX hard drive. Firmware modules are located on the service area on the platters. For some reason if one or more modules get corrupted, Western Digital WD30EZRX hard drives become inaccessible. If you attempt to access drives with firmware corruption, you will see error messages like boot failure, no operating system found, S.M.A.R.T or other BIOS errors. It is impossible to fix these errors by Do-it-Yourself data recovery. So you will have to RMA the drive and loose and data you had on it or use a professional data recovery service.If your drive is working well for you now great! I hope it continues to do so without firmware corruption for a long time.I can NOT recommend this drive for anything because of it's unpredictability.Western Digital is usually very reliable. But they have let the quality control down on these drive just like the EARS(512to4k) drives.
Скроменый эксперт
19.06.2012
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
Hard drive reviews come in two flavors: Wary and Angry.I've had hard drives fail before, which tossed me in the angry category for a while, but now I'm back in the wary category. I was wary that this drive would be fast enough for my new computer build as a complement to a 120GB SSD boot drive. That is, I wanted to place most of my music, video games, and video on this drive without seeing a speed drop in the basic computer function. I was wary of a variable RPM for the platters of this Caviar Green HDD, but my fears have been laid to rest.This hard drive rocks.The first thing I noticed was that the drive is pretty heavy. It feels about as well insulated as bumps and drops as any HDD will ever be. The drive is a full 2TB after factory formatting, not like 1.7TB (which is a racket - I hate that). It installed quickly after I plugged it into a SATA 3Gb/s port. This drive will never push the transfer capabilities of newer SATA technologies, but you'll likely never notice. According to another reviewer, faster spin speeds are better for pulling files from various places on a drive and slower spin speeds are better for fewer, larger files. The leaves analogy is good here. As I have been using it, it's awesome. It transfers files quickly, runs quiet, uses little power, and has lots of space. I've only used ~45% of the drive, and that's >7 years of files built up including ~20 TV series, ~70 movies, and ~125 GB of music.Given my setup, I can't comment on how quickly a computer would boot up using this HDD. I would assume that it's of average speed. I also can't comment on the failure rate of this drive. The adage I've heard is to plan on your HDDs failing on average every 3-6 years. Backup everything and backup your most important files at least twice. Consider cloud storage for your most important photos or documents.
Скроменый эксперт
31.08.2011
6/10
Оценка пользователя
Плохо
Originally, I gave the drive 1 Star because of the reasons shown directly below. Since it turns out that registration with WD is pointless, because their "Align" utility did not work, the UPDATE of September 16th explains how I got the drive (well, 3 of them) to work and how two of the drives seem so far. The overall score is based on both of those experiences.ORIGINAL COMMENTS from SEPTEMBER 1, 2011:This 2T hard drive is pre-formatted for Vista, Windows 7, etc. It will not work with Windows XP unless you run a free utility that you can download from Western Digital (WDC). However ...Before you can download that utility, you must register with WDC, and part of that long, tedious registration process involves disclosing a LOT of personal information. You cannot skip any of these steps, as all of them are "Required."As to the quality of the hard drive, I cannot say, since I have not yet tried to use their utility program. And yes, I know we normally review products here, but invasion of privacy supersedes that.And it's a shame, because I've been buying WDC drives for years, and until now, have preferred them to other brands, and have recommended their drives to people who ask me for technical support.UPDATE SEPTEMBER 16, 2011:The "Align" utility program did not work. I tried it on two different XP-Pro SP3 computers and got the same results. Beginning with the drive right out of the box, Windows saw the drive and wanted to convert it to a Dynamic disk. I needed specific partitioning, so I cancelled the Windows Initialization Wizard and tried the WD (Acronis) utility. It could not find the drive on either computer, even though it showed up in Windows "My Computer" | Manage | Disk Management."So, I initialized the drive with Partition Wizard and tried the WD utility again. This time, it found the drive but said there were no partitions needing alignment on that drive. However, it did offer to align partitions on another drive that's been working under XP for a couple of years. Even though I do daily backup, my curiosity was insufficient to accept that offer.In the end, I went back to Partition Wizard to complete the preparation for use with XP: created a tiny hidden partition so that the main partition won't show up as "D:", and allocated the rest of the drive as a nearly 2T partition. Had to quick-format the big partition, which could be done either with Windows or Partition Wizard.So far, the two drives I've used seem to work properly, run quietly and fairly cool, go into Standby when not in use, and wake up on demand. Fingers are crossed that the data problems some other people have reported will not happen here, but I will be using 3 of these so that two of them can be backups for the active one. These two drives are in external enclosures that have both eSATA II and USB 2.0 ports.
Скроменый эксперт
26.08.2012
2/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
I've been happy with Western Digital drives for many years, but this is the first time I've had a drive arrive close to DOA. I purchased this drive for use in by backups using Acronis True Image. The day I received the drive I plugged it in and it worked fine. Booted up to Windows 7 and formatted the drive. I did a full system backup and everything still seemed OK. The next day I restarted my computer and the computer would not boot past the BIOS screen. My first bit of troubleshooting was to unplug this HDD, and what do you know, computer booted right up. So over the next while, I tried plugging this HDD into each of my 4 SATA drives on my motherboard, but no matter which one I used, it prevents my computer from booting up, but if the drive is not connected, everything boots just fine. My final bit of troubleshooting was to attempt to boot into the Acronis recovery boot disk, but again, once my computer hits the BIOS screen it just stops. If the drive had not worked just fine for 1 day, I might think there was something wrong with my computer, but the fact that everything worked fine and then it didn't makes me pretty sure it's the drive's failure and nothing else.I would return to Amazon for an exchange/refund, but this drive has an image of my entire computer on it. Passwords, financial data, personal files, all imaged onto the drive and I have no way to access it and wipe it clean before I return it. So I'm basically stuck with an expensive paper weight.I guess it's onto another manufacturer for my 2 TB backup drive solution.
Скроменый эксперт
30.01.2013
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
Great drive - for storage. Unless you have a new motherboard with UEFI. Everything I've read says you can't use this as a boot drive without it, and I believe it.I have an older system (quad core Athlon II), and I tried to connect this drive via a USB 2.0 Thermaltake BlacX dock so I could transfer the files from my old drive on a 3-year old motherboard (ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO), and even with Win7-64, setting the drive up with a GPT partition instead of MBR, Windows only saw 750 GB.I had to open the case and directly connect the drive to the motherboard after installing the latest chipset drivers, and THEN, hallelujah - the full 3TB was there. I think I got 100Mb/s transfer rate (if not, it was close) and put everything back together. Have been happy as a clam since.So for the tl;dr people with older motherboards - connect directly to your motherboard, install latest chipset drivers and set as GPT partition, not MBR. If you still don't get the full capacity, consider a 2TB drive instead.
Скроменый эксперт
11.03.2012
2/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
For quite a long time I've been WD fan. I put WD drives in any computer I put my hands on. I've sinned, but I know better now...5 months ago I've bought 8 of those drives to exchange 7 1TB drives in my Linux server. The 1TB drives were (and are - I use them still) OK, I just run out of space. Since then I did not have a single week without some kind of failure. 3 drives are failing mechanically (almost 40% failure rate!), I have random intermittent read errors. I rolled up my sleeves and run some tests; this is what I've found:The read errors coincide with only ONE relevant (Power On Hours is not relevant, for example) changing SMART attribute - Multi-Zone Error Rate. The description of it is a bit misleading and nobody really seems to know, what it is; here: [...] it says something about writing errors, but the writes to the disk were always OK - after a retry or retries the correct data was read. The problems appeared only while reading. And only when this parameter was changing (i.e. - growing).The real big, bad issue is that the drive does not inform me about problems it had reading data! So far it looks like when the disk hits a problematic sector (so the MZER grows), instead of reporting that, it returns some arbitrary data and pretends everything is rosy - no read error, nothing - just corrupted data! So you might copy a file and find it later corrupted. Or your system will miraculously crash.I would suggest returning this drive on the very first sight of MZER>0; even better - just avoid it altogether.As a result, yet another disk has been RMAd to WD; hopefully they will accept it under warranty, as they did before; I really wouldn't like to give them only one star...Yet they managed. If the drive is RMAed, the replacement has a warranty of... ~100 days. If the original, 3y-warranty drive breaks in first 6 months, the effective warranty will be shorter than 1 year! Oh, well, that's easy, sell crap with '3y warranty', when it breaks, shorten it to 10 months. Well done, WD.
Скроменый эксперт
19.12.2012
2/10
Оценка пользователя
Ужасно
I've spent the past few months diagnosing this between school and work. The hard drive I was sent had the potential to be 5 star, but they sent me a defective one. It crashes at least three times a week now. I've tried swapping sata cables: there was no luck. I tried swapping power lines, in case it was a short caused by the PSU; nothing fixed it still. I even started changing the sata ports for all the hard drives just on the off chance I had a defective one in the motherboard; no. I've run disk check, I've run the system file checker; no results. I even popped in a fresh copy of a windows 7 disk to run the start up repair utility: nothing happened again. I've no other option than to assume it is a defective internal Hard Drive, unless someone wants to correct me, which I would love. I love this 2 TB hard drive. I just don't love that it keeps screwing up on me. When it DOES work though, it works quite nicely. Not sure I notice much of a great difference between an Intellisense drive or just a straight 7200rpm drive.
Скроменый эксперт
03.03.2013
10/10
Оценка пользователя
Великолепно
Their mostly deployed within NAS (Network Attached Storage) units. Quiet, low energy consumption, service efficient and combined with 1, 2 or 3 of their siblings, they've been above average performers for our residential installation needs. Primarily to retain static (non changing) files such as virtual machines, pc images, music, movies, pictures and tv shows - they house this content, then allow other systems to stream locally on our network without any known or identifiable problems to date. We've purchased "other brands" in the past, including Western Digitals main competitor, and those particular brands prematurely went bad (like weeks or months post installation) - so much so, that WD has become the primary brand choice for our storage solutions moving forward.
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