Don't use the Green line for anything performance related, even if it's watching videos. The Green line is simply not intended for that. I think it's designed to be an occasionally-accessed backup drive, or something like that.
The Black line is the performance-conscious line, look at the corresponding equivalents in that line. IIRC the Blacks are 10-15% more expensive, but they actually respond.
It's true that Green drives aren't intended for performance-related tasks, but it's wildly incorrect to imply that streaming video to a single user qualifies as a performance-related task in this context. Blu-ray video maxes out at what, 50 megabits per sec? WD Green drives from 2010 have no problem attaining sequential read speeds of 100 megabytes per second. They'll manage 50 megabytes per second even with random reads.
Also, I have streamed a lot raw Blu-ray files from my WD Green drives over a gigabit network with absolutely zero issues.
B-con is confused. The behavior in question - the drive powering down right away - would actually occur less frequently if I were trying to do something "high performance." It's the fact that a single user playing mp3 or video sequentially is pretty laid back that means the drive gets a chance to shut off.
Of course, you wouldn't want to use these in a server, either. Or for anything, really.
edit: in response to your comment below, the reason you haven't seen glitching with your high-bitrate video is probably that it's high-enough quality video (lots of data) that the OS never caches enough of it to let the drive stop working and go to sleep. Or else maybe WD have altered the stock settings of these drives. They certainly should have.
edit again: if you've had them for "many years" then we aren't talking about the same hardware
I've had several of them in my home server for many years. It gets heavy use from 1 or 2 users (which as far as the server and drives are concerned is not "heavy use"), and has never had any issues streaming any content, from MP3s all the way up to raw Blu-ray files.
I am with you; i have a 1.5TB WD green as my main non-ssd storage medium, and it performs great. I put everything on there, movies, music, photos, Virtual Machines, etc, and I've never had any kind of (overly) noticeable performance problems.
Thirded. My media server is 6 terabytes worth of WD Green drives and they don't exhibit the issue described with stops and starts and I've never done anything to shut the "intelligent parking" off.
I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself.
> I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself.
On a Windows 7 machine with lots of RAM and a 3TB WD Green secondary drive, Foobar 2000 music playback and VLC video playback both exhibit the problem behavior. I don't think whatever read-ahead caching those programs do is designed to accommodate the latency involved in getting the drive going again.
Also, consider how a random playlist of thousands of songs works - reading all the songs into RAM isn't really an option. Foobar 2000 definitely does some read-ahead caching, I've noticed that a few seconds of music will sometimes play at the beginning of a song and then pause, as the software blocks waiting for the disk to get going.
I believe you, I just haven't run into this myself and I guess it is correct that YMMV depending upon setup then.
All of my WD Green drives are sitting in a Linux server and exposed as samba shares to various computers (including some running Windows 7) and HTPC devices. My guess would be that this setup results in greedier read-ahead caching by the local OS because of the relative slowness and unreliability of accessing blocks via a network-share file versus what the OS considers to be a local file.
> B-con is confused. The behavior in question - the drive powering down right away - would actually occur less frequently if I were trying to do something "high performance."
I'm not confused.
a) The drive will only stay on if the performance requirements are constant. But many performance use cases don't ensure that there is constant activity to the drive, so the drive may shut off.
YMMV for your specific situation, obviously, but buys should know that the Green drives aren't oriented at performance. If they give you what you want, great, but don't buy them and then be surprised when little performance hiccups happen.
There should be disclaimers about that when you buy such HDDs. I wouldn't consider watching videos a performance related activity. I say this is WD's failure at properly marketing their product lines.
Like others have mentioned, please make sure you're using wdidle to regulate head parking. Also might wanna read this http://forums.freenas.org/threads/western-digital-red-with-t... . Greens are dangerous in a NAS context so make sure you have backups.
Odd. The link you posted directly contradicts your point. It says that Reds are at that time unproven and that the Greens are the way to go for ZFS. Basically it is saying that ZFS does not require TLER so that part is not an issue. On top of that it is saying that the Green drives are both common and well tested.
I think I read it slightly differently then, the gist was that if wdidle is properly used, the drives "should" be equivalent (since they supposedly share the same hardware, just different firmware).
Reds are made for a NAS context, greens are not. You may or may not make the difference go away by using wdidle. This does make greens inherently dangerous (when compared to reds).
I've had 4 Green 3TB drives in a raidZ for less than a year. First few months were great, then I had to replace two of them a couple months ago due to data errors and another just started failing so today (literally as I write this) I'm replacing the other two.
Don't use Greens for anything that's on and could be active 24/7. The aggressive load cycling kills them.
I bought 3 Green 2.5TB drives for a Synology NAS that's lightly used -- and all 3 have had SMART failures in the ~18 months that I've owned them. WD just sent me a refurb'ed Green 3TB drive, let's see if it holds out better.
I wish I had had access to this data before buying the Greens...
The Black line is the performance-conscious line, look at the corresponding equivalents in that line. IIRC the Blacks are 10-15% more expensive, but they actually respond.