Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org> wrote:
> On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
>> videos on, eventually.  The prices are coming down now.  I keep seeing
>> these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
>>  When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?
>
>
> As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be
> fine.
>
> The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the
> enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you
> don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup...
>

+1

I use the WD 1TB Green drive for storing video outside my machine
using both USB & eSATA. Works fine. Very quite, cool. Way faster than
necessary for streaming movies. Nice.

As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support
time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view
of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in
any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to
Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years.

HTH,
Mark