Which Hard Disk Brand is best??Hitachi

Interesting. I was looking for an HDD and I was looking at WD blues and blacks on Newegg. The user reviews had a run of bad WDs in a span of weeks and now wasn't a good time to buy 'em. They were popular though and I decided to get a Seagate Constellation Enterprise 1TB drive. It's more than I want to pay but the reviews were very good and it's got a 5 year warranty. It's working good and very quiet.

My old drive was a WD green 500GB and it's 4 years old. Still working when I put it up and by the way it's a 5400 rpm drive.

kbrady1979 said:

...Also, I'm not sold on the whole "Green" line of drives because I don't believe they do save much, if anything. I recently performed a zero write test, and a long duration sequential read test on my new 2TB 7200.14 drive. At the same time my friend was running the same tests on a 2TB green drive he just got in for a friends HTPC build. My Full Erase/Zero Write elapsed time was 3hrs 34 minutes, and my Long Read time was 3hrs 28 minutes. The exact same tests on the Green drive took 6hrs 0 min, and 5hrs 58 min. The specs on these drives are identical....SATA III, 64MB Cache, 2TB capacity.......the only difference is mine is a 7200 rpm drive and the green drive is...well, slower. Does a drive that takes twice as long to perform a task actually save anything?...

The green drives save power. They draw less current than the faster drives. They are best for storing infrequently accessed data. The computer I'm building will have a 2TB WD Black for the main data drive that I will be in and out of frequently and will use WD 2TB Greens for storing videos and for making backups. The Greens should be fast enough for playing videos and who cares how long it takes to do a backup? Start the back up, then watch TV, go see a movie, go to bed, whatever. The backup program I have can even shut down the computer for me when the back up is done if I want.

And at times, I've sworn at them. All seriousness aside, I've had only one WD go belly up on me and two Seagates went bad on me (I still have all three of them; they were useful as dummy drives for making up a cable for my new build). The two longest lasting drives I ever had was a 120GB WD external drive that lasted a good seven years. I replaced it because I had outgrown it and it was starting to get a bit noisy (I actually still have it; why, I don't know). The other was a 60 GB Maxtor in my old Gateway desktop that was still going strong when I retired the machine after seven years (for the last five of those years, the machine ran 24/7).

Lady Fitzgerald said:

kbrady1979 said:

...Also, I'm not sold on the whole "Green" line of drives because I don't believe they do save much, if anything. I recently performed a zero write test, and a long duration sequential read test on my new 2TB 7200.14 drive. At the same time my friend was running the same tests on a 2TB green drive he just got in for a friends HTPC build. My Full Erase/Zero Write elapsed time was 3hrs 34 minutes, and my Long Read time was 3hrs 28 minutes. The exact same tests on the Green drive took 6hrs 0 min, and 5hrs 58 min. The specs on these drives are identical....SATA III, 64MB Cache, 2TB capacity.......the only difference is mine is a 7200 rpm drive and the green drive is...well, slower. Does a drive that takes twice as long to perform a task actually save anything?...

The green drives save power. They draw less current than the faster drives. They are best for storing infrequently accessed data. The computer I'm building will have a 2TB WD Black for the main data drive that I will be in and out of frequently and will use WD 2TB Greens for storing videos and for making backups. The Greens should be fast enough for playing videos and who cares how long it takes to do a backup? Start the back up, then watch TV, go see a movie, go to bed, whatever. The backup program I have can even shut down the computer for me when the back up is done if I want.

Some of the green drives had a very aggressive power saving feature that parked the heads every few seconds....if you accessed data at the wrong times it would constantly park and spool back up. This has been corrected recently, I believe, but I still don't think they save enough power to be worthwhile...that's just my opinion.

kbrady1979 said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

kbrady1979 said:

...Also, I'm not sold on the whole "Green" line of drives because I don't believe they do save much, if anything. I recently performed a zero write test, and a long duration sequential read test on my new 2TB 7200.14 drive. At the same time my friend was running the same tests on a 2TB green drive he just got in for a friends HTPC build. My Full Erase/Zero Write elapsed time was 3hrs 34 minutes, and my Long Read time was 3hrs 28 minutes. The exact same tests on the Green drive took 6hrs 0 min, and 5hrs 58 min. The specs on these drives are identical....SATA III, 64MB Cache, 2TB capacity.......the only difference is mine is a 7200 rpm drive and the green drive is...well, slower. Does a drive that takes twice as long to perform a task actually save anything?...

The green drives save power. They draw less current than the faster drives. They are best for storing infrequently accessed data. The computer I'm building will have a 2TB WD Black for the main data drive that I will be in and out of frequently and will use WD 2TB Greens for storing videos and for making backups. The Greens should be fast enough for playing videos and who cares how long it takes to do a backup? Start the back up, then watch TV, go see a movie, go to bed, whatever. The backup program I have can even shut down the computer for me when the back up is done if I want.

Some of the green drives had a very aggressive power saving feature that parked the heads every few seconds....if you accessed data at the wrong times it would constantly park and spool back up. This has been corrected recently, I believe, but I still don't think they save enough power to be worthwhile...that's just my opinion.

If you have only one drive, the savings would be insignificant. However, with several drives, the savings (less heat, lower electric bill, less load on PSU) could be significant. In my case, I will have up to five Greens in my machine (plus one will occasionally be in a HDD hot swap bay) in addition to one WD Black. I also have three Greens for every 3.5" drive in use to use for backups (I'm a coward when it comes to my data and redundancy is a good thing). That means I can have up to 18 3.5" spinners. Besides cutting power consumption in the machine itself, buying Greens would save some serious shekels.

Have used both Seagate and Western Digital HDDs, but if given a choice I always opt for WD HDDs as they have never failed me. I also have not had a Seagate die as well, but Seagate HDDs always seem to have flukey SMART readouts so I'm generally wary of them slightly.

Also, regarding those "green" drives, don't use them for RAID arrays; I've heard their power saving routines can play bad tricks in a RAID array.