Just wondered what you guys thought of the reliability of the 2 TB Caviar Green? I know there reliability wasnt able to match there 1 TB counterpart early on, but what about now?
Like most of the WD Green scare stories, I think it's a bit of a non-issue. I hear more issues with Seagate and Samsung's drives than the WDs really, and to put people's minds at rest, the drive that got all the bad press was the WD20EADS. The current 2TB drive from WD is different, the WD20EARS, though its 4K sector system means it's not readable by legacy operating systems (e.g. Windows XP and older) unless you jumper that off.
I have to say that I have not had any WD drives fail on me in a few months...they fail on my customers, but they don't fail on me. Then again, I have not purchased any WD drives since I got three dead 1.5TB drives in a row a few months ago, and thus, WD has had no chance to fail on me. I almost wish one of my seagates would die on me; right now I feel like my RAID5 is going to waste on a bunch of drives that won't break.
Depends which Seagates they are. If they're 7200.9/7200.10s you're pretty safe. If they're 7200.11s or 7200.12s your RAID array will almost inevitably be put to the test at some point in the future.
I have a 7200.10 thats lasted me for about 2 years. No complaints here, although it does run a bit warmer then my 1TB WD Caviar Black and Caviar Green at times. @killer, 3 in a row as in they likley came from 3 different batches? @sam, thanks for pointing out the difference on the Greens. There were 3 drives and aside from EARS having 64MB Cache the others seemed like nothing more then a firmware change or something along that line.
I know what you mean. I've had 3 Samsung F1's in RAID5 as long as an F1 have been <$100. I had to simulate breakdowns by unplugging things just to teach myself at rebuilding the array. No better way to learn I guess than when things are backed up, still working, and you have an extra TB laying around.
Funny thing...I have drives from all four of these series; they all work fine. Yes, I bought one, it was bad, I sent it back, they sent another, it was bad, I sent it back, they sent another, it was bad, I sent it back and spent my refund on a Seagate that worked (and still works) perfectly. I honestly don't know how big of a batch newegg buys at a time, but given the fact that this whole disaster took over a month, I have to assume that I got drives from at least two batches. Even if all three drives were from the same batch, that means that a huge percentage of that batch must have been defective but never recalled. Buy from WD, Apple, McAfee, Norton, Asus, or whoever you want...you are free to make mistakes. As for me? I will avoid WD 3.5" drives like the plague. BTW...their 2.5" drives are great...a bit expensive, but mechanically sound; I have no problems with those.
There was one massive batch of bad WD green drives to newegg, that was quite obvious by the reviews. I imagine the ones you got were all from the same lot. Products used as RMAs may not necessarily come from the same stock as the retail ones. I still can't excuse the fact that a huge pile of WD drives newegg sold were bad, but so far so good with all 10 of mine, all bought at different times.
If WD refuses to test their products before shipping them, then that is just another strike against them. I can understand a few % getting out, as it is expensive to test every single drive...but when I can get three with three different serial numbers, all bad, I can only assume that they didn't test that batch at all. Also, they never issued any recall...if there was some problem with just one batch of their drives, WD obviously does not care. Oh, and I know I have a RAID card that might have possibly messed with certain drives; but these drives all failed from the onboard ports as well. Regardless, I wasted over $50 on cross-shipping and a whole month of waiting for the extra space I needed...when I could have just ordered a Seagate and called it a day. I never got a refund for any of the shipping, and I had to pay a restocking fee when I finally gave up and asked for a refund. I guess WD would not be as bad if I had used Amazon (free return shipping, no restocking fees)...but even still, I would have lost the time. [edit] One other thing...and I honestly don't mean this as a dig at you Sam...but I already considered WD to be crap. The only reason I gave them another chance was because Sammorris was so convincing with his claims that WD had brought their quality up. I gave them three chances in a row, on your advise...at this point, there is nothing you could say that would convince me to give them another chance.
Not really a case of 'bringing their quality up', with the exception of the first release batch of the WD5000AAKS, all the WD stuff I've owned (about 20 drives) has been fine. So have the Samsung/Seagate drives to be fair, apart from the fact that one of my Samsungs picked up a single bad sector and had to be reformatted before it would reallocate. By contrast the majority of people I know have serious problems with Samsung drives. Seagate have been fine apart from the 7200.11, which pretty much everyone I know who owns them has had problems.
At least we have some common ground...Samsung can't make hard drives that work...or at least not drives that work well. I wonder if my power settings are why my .11 drives never have issues; I have them set to never turn off; so the load/unload cycles are very low...that might even be my WD problem; as they seemed to want to turn off every 5-20 minutes...maybe that is why WD tries to block hardware RAID on their drives.
Not had any issues with either of the 750GB F1s I own, but the 1TB ones were absolutely useless. WD does not block hardware RAID at all, they just sell 'RAID edition' drives for those foolish enough to throw money at them. Four of my drives have had the load cycle bug since they were new in early 2008, and have been on 24/7 at idle since then, racking up about 500,000 load cycles. So far no trouble out of any of them. I think the load cycle bug is overstated somewhat.
