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There's a very good deal on a 5TB green WD that I intend to catch. However I hear that green WDs might be slower than other drives. I know that the RPM speed for green drives are is mentioned and is called IntelliPower.

Actually I don't understand the RPM thing. I don't really care about this number. I need a simple approach that I can understand. I mean, for example, what would my read and write speeds be? 10 MB/s maybe? what would my copy speed be? Is there a range? Would it vary depending on the size of the files maybe? If so, How?

Also I saw some forums about some people complaining about a 500 KB/s copy speed. What about that? Do all green WDs experience this speed in some condition? Or is it just them? Or does it depend on something?

One more thing. I intend to place my OSs on an SSD. I intend to use the green just for storage. I don't really care to have a super-speedy HDD but I don't want to get stuck with a turtle (which, awkwardly enough, is also green XD).

Any kind of any help is appreciated :D I hope I get to meet people who own green WDs and have experience with them. Thanks in advance :)

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  • I mentioned that in bold!! 4th paragraph. @Dave
    – 842Mono
    Dec 24, 2014 at 21:51
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    copy speeds have several factors including size. If you are copying 10,000 files total 1MB a single 1MB file will transfer much faster. Each file has to be open,read, and copied therefore that is 30,000 operations and 1 single file has 3.
    – cybernard
    Dec 24, 2014 at 21:57
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    A WD Green drive is perfectly fine for storage purposes but be aware that it does goes into a "sleep" mode after some inactivity and if you go to access a file while it is in sleep mode then you have to wait very briefly (1-5 seconds) for the HDD to spin up and read the requested file/folder. This "sleep mode" has been attributed to shortened life expectancy for the HDD due to how often it "parks" the head. So don't keep any important files on the 5TB unless you are fully prepared to lose them all.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:04
  • Then it comes down to the average size of your files. If your average is 8+mb performance slow downs should minimal. Everyone read small files sometimes, but it is not until you read many in a row that performance falls. For example, 10 small files in 1gb of data will be unnoticeable.
    – cybernard
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:04
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    If you would like to learn more about this amazing green technology then you can check out this article. instantfundas.com/2011/12/… There is a reason you are catching such a "good deal" on this green drive and that's because other people know enough to stay away for the most part. Pay the price now or pay it later. It scares me to see the number of desktops which are sold with these drives installed as the boot drive.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:06

2 Answers 2

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This question is subjective in nature, and may not be suited as an SU question. You have not advised your usage case, but i'll take a stab anyway.

This should be fine - provided you are using it in a workstation and you expect to be able to watch movies or similar in real time. Green drives are very similar to other drives hardware wise, save as the firmware takes decisions to prioritise reduced power (and thus heat) over increased speed (and you probably can't change this). You would expect a GREEN drive to give substanitally more then 500KB speeds - although I can't quantify it without knowing the model you are looking at you would expect a lot more then 20MByte / sec for any spinning drive.

According to the specs for the drives you should be able to sustain over 147 MB/sec - although this is alnost certainly unrealistic in real life.

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  • I can't even buy stuff from them from where I live - but to get a feel from techies about tech stuff, Newegg is a US shopping site which usually has decent reviews and ratings - Search Google for "wd green newegg" and get reading !
    – davidgo
    Dec 24, 2014 at 21:49
  • okay I'll search. ...I mentioned my case in the forth paragraph. I don't need it to be the fastest hard disk ever but I don't want it to bee too slow either. It's for a home use computer. It's not a server or anything. I just need to run some games, some powerful programs, some movies, some music. ...To cut to the chase, a 10 MB/s would be very fine by me. Thanks for your answer :)
    – 842Mono
    Dec 24, 2014 at 21:56
  • ...also I got some fear when I saw people saying "my green WD copies with a 500 KB/s"!! Oh no! I wouldn't want my hard disk that slow!!
    – 842Mono
    Dec 24, 2014 at 21:58
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    If your disk is doing 500KB/s either the drive is faulty or the interface or software is faulty. I've never seen a drive transfer data at < 10 MB/sec unless it was clearly dying and I was doing data recovery on it. Typical drive performance will be 50 - 100 MB / second, and that is true for Green drives as well.
    – davidgo
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:01
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    If copying on the same drive, you have to both read and write, so assuming (incorrectly) similar read and write speeds, halve the 50MB. Then you have the issue of small files which means seeking all over the drive [ fragmentation ] and that slows things down as well - a 1k file might still read 1 mb of data for example. Also, the data at the edge of the disk (usually near the beginning) can be read twice as fast as near the inner part of the disk. 20MB, while slow does not neccessarily indicate a failure of the hardware, but defragmenting and freeing space may be indicated.
    – davidgo
    Dec 24, 2014 at 22:08
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I would like to warn you for those WD green drives. I personally think those WD green drives are only good for pure storage. Think about things like backups. I personally would not want them in any of my machines, unless maybe if they will be used for backups and for backups only.

I did have a bad experience with a WD green 3TB (this one has 5400rpm). That drive was used as the only drive in a machine though. As a single drive it had horrible performance, and in the end was replaced with an SSD + a WD black. Performance of the whole machine suffered from that green drive and was incomparable with the performance that it has now.

Isn't it a bit suspicious that the rotational speed of those drives is not mentioned? Even if those drives have some adaptive speed or a specific speed per model, the rotational speed or the range of the rotational speed must be known. I suspect it is very low, 5400rpm or maybe even lower like 4200rpm.

So, my opinion: those green drives might be an interesting buy if you only use the drive for pure storage and you only have to deal with large files, and you always have at most 1 process at a time that needs to write or read from that drive. As soon as multiple processes start fighting for access to the disk, to files that are in different physical locations on the disk, performance will be horrible.

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  • Reliability tests on the web at various times have shown that MTBF for higher speed rotation drives can be lower. at least one study sugested that 7200rpm drives would die over time faster than low RPM. With the high density platters, the speed of sequential large data is not that much different, compared to when there was very low density, or very little data per revolution. As they increase the total TB on the disks being the beta tester for the new design :-) might not go so well. The stuff that has been out for long enough to test in time has made it time about as well as any others.
    – Psycogeek
    Dec 24, 2014 at 23:27

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