How did they fix the issue on newer drives? 8 seconds is still 8 seconds after all. You'll still get an excessively high load cycle count compared to a "normal" drive, unless the drive is hardly ever in use. Didn't the older drives stay parked until you accessed them anyway?
The freenas forum still has reports of excessively high counts even on the more recently manufactured greens. Or did they make them more reliable somehow?
Can't say I've ever actually used any Greens though as the intellipark feature never appealed to me. I've always stuck to Blues and Blacks. Usually the Blues are my go to drive though as they're a decent performing drive for the price.
Pity they won't make the larger storage Blues (2 - 6TB) run at 7,200 rpm. Larger & faster Blues would be a welcome addition.
Agree that 5,400 just isn't good enough for an OS drive.
The first Greens had a bug that caused the heads to repeatedly park and unpark, even when the drive wasn't being accessed; that was what caused them to fail prematurely. Frankly, I felt the author of first article you linked didn't know what he was talking about.
The Greens were never intended to be used for anything other than light duty storage. They are like an inexpensive economy car; to get the energy savings, you have to sacrifice performance and some durability. An economy car is fine for a daily, short distance commuter and as a grocery getter but try to use it for frequent or long distance operation, such as taxi cab, delivery vehicle, or daily, long distance commutes, you will wear it out quickly. The same is true of Greens; they are an economy drive intended for light duty usage, such as low duty cycle storage in computers that run only a few hours a day. Power users, such as myself or businesses, should never use the Greens for anything other than backups. Unfortunately, many users, and even manufacturers, try to cut corners (or, to put more harshly, albeit accurately, cheap out) and use the Greens where they never should have been used, such as in RAIDs or as an OS drive, which helped contribute to the undeserved, continuing bad reputation they still have.
The new WD Purples, which were intended solely for surveillance use, have a similar problem. Many people have tried to use them in their computers for normal storage, and even RAIDs, then complained about data corruption. Drives used for surveillance recording receive a continuous data feed. Most drives, if a glitch occurs, will attempt to rewrite the glitched data. If a drive being used to record a surveillance feed were to do that, there would be occasional dropouts in the video because of the time wasted in error correction. To avoid that problem, the Purples were designed with no error correction. This may result in occasional artifacts in the recorded video but, at least, what is recorded is continuous without any skips or gaps. However, when used to save files, an uncorrected error will result in data loss.
I run my computer 24/7 with multiple processes going on from time to time that give its HDDs a pretty fair workout. I could run Greens in it and would probably be ok but I would be pushing my luck and they wouldn't last as long as a better drive, so I chose instead to use the better, more appropriate WD Blacks. There is a reason why the Blacks have a five year warranty and the Greens have only a two year warranty.
I currently have 12 WD Greens in service that I use for backup drives. Of the two I have that failed, one was an early Green that both had the excessive head parking issue and had been installed in my old XP machine as an OS drive by a reputable computer repair chain (not GweekSquad) that should have known better (that was one of the reasons I decided I better learn more about computers). The other was one that was approaching the end of its warranty period and had started to throw reallocation errors. None of them (including the one that had to be replaced under warranty) are (were) anywhere remotely close to exceeding their rated Load/Unload Cycle Count limit.
5400 rpm HDDs work fine for an OS drive; they are just slower. Many netbooks, notebooks, and laptops came with them to inexpensively reduce power consumption, thus increasing battery life. What make the Greens inappropriate for an OS drive is not their speed, but the head parking feature. An OS drive is accessed far more frequently than most storage drives so, a HDD that parks its heads when inactive will be far more frequently unparking/reparking the heads than a drive that is just used for storage only, shortening its life dramatically.
