Western Digital WD Green WD15EADS 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive Western Digital WD Green WD15EADS 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Cost is massively affordable.

Cons: Western Digital outright refuses to support linux for their drives. You can find this as quoted from their support line all across the web. If you use these disks in linux, you will have problems because they have a 8s idle timer set. This means, the drives park the heads after 8s. Most distros don't touch the disk this often, so this can cause massive temproray system hangs. However, if you use this util: http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show.php?lang=enu&q_id=407

You can correct the problem by disabling the 'green' feature of the drives.

Other Thoughts: ho hum..

Pros: Nice quiet drives. I got these not as bare drives, but as USB externals (WD Element). I took them out for RAID setup. These should make nice desktop drives. Read below for caveats as RAID drives.

Cons: WD changed the firmware Oct 2009 to disable SCT ERC (Error Recovery Control). These drives are desktop drives that have a 2 minute ERC setting. Most hardware RAID controllers require a maximum of 7 seconds ERC or your drives will be kicked out of RAID array if it takes too long to recover a sector. Note the RAID controller can recovery the troubled sector itself from the parity disk so it doesn't need the drives to try very hard to recover. This timing is the main difference between RAID drives and desktop drives. Prior to Oct 2009 you could use a WD (leaked) utility to enable the WD equivalent of ERC (called TLER - Time Limited Error Recovery) that would then set the recovery timer to 7 seconds. On the newer drives, you should only use them as desktop drives.

Other Thoughts: In addition, the green feature of the drive parks the head very often (every 8 seconds I think). If you use the drive as a Linux OS drive, chances are the drive head will be parked/unparked so often that it will exceed the rated 300,000 load cycles in less than a year. There is another WD (leaked) utility that allows you to set the park timer from 8 seconds to a maximum of 5 minutes. It uses a little more power but prolongs the drive life span. If you use the drive mainly as storage, then there should be nothing to worry about.

Pros: using 8 of these in linux mdadm RAID6, single ext4 file system.

Quiet, Cool, reads from the array can saturate dual 1 gigabit links with jumbo frames and bonding via 802.3ad. Haven't really tested the raw read/write of the array as theses are in a file server and if i can saturate the network link, thats all i care about.

Cons: had to tinker around to make sure the heads don't park too often, WD could make this a far less annoying process.

Pros: Quiet, extremely cool, reasonably priced.

Cons: Latency problems.

Other Thoughts: When used in Linux (mythtv) under a steady load, model WD15EADS-00P8B0 drive experiences IO latency problems.

Pros: These disks are currently the lowest $/GB for low-power drives. They are very quiet, and fast enough for my at-home storage server.

Newegg's packaging of these drives has been mentioned in many of these reviews. My drives were packed very nicely, in a styrofoam tray that was wrapped in bubblewrap, and styrofoam peanuts. All drives arrived in perfect condition, none DOA. Maybe Newegg has changed their drive packaging technique, or I got special packing becuase I purchased four drives.

As with everything else I buy at Newegg, these shipped very quickly.

Cons: WD recommends against using these drives in a Linux or RAID system due to their usage patterns.

These drives use IntelliPower, which makes the drive park its heads and possibly spin down every eight seconds. If you have a process that touches the disk every ten seconds, SMART will show the Load Cycle Count increase very quickly. There has been a lot of ranting and raving about this, though I haven't heard and solid report about these drives prematurely failing.

Other Thoughts: I purchased four of these for my low-power Linux/RAID/LVM media server. These are replacements for a quartet of WD drives in the server I purchased years ago, one of which failed. I ended up writing a script that is run on startup that forces the disks to be touched every five seconds. This has stopped the Load Cycle Count from increasing, though I presumably lose some of the low-power benefit these drives bring. It's also possible this will kill the drives faster then just letting the LCC pile up, time will tell.

This script is run in the background at startup (note, replace the XX with bee ess (for 'b'lock 's'ize: lower case b, followed by a lower case s: Newegg's review filter didn't like those two letters together):

while true ; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/noidle XX=512 count=4 &> /dev/null ; sync ; sleep 5 ; done

Pros: Good drives: quiet, low power, high storage. I currently have three of these (software raid5 using XFS) working without a hitch in my SuSE linux server. No errors, no problems. Looking forward to adding a fourth WD 1.5TB drive to the cluster.

Cons: Not really a con, but the drives spin down when not in use. As such, they can take a few seconds to spin up after being idle. Doesn't cause problems with raid, and saves me electricity, so who cares.

Other Thoughts: Comparing these drives to the Seagate 1.5TB drives is night and day. Tested two Seagate 1.5TB drives that had updated firmware. Both drives, single and in a mirror, repeatedly froze up, clicked, had repeated bad sectors, failed out of raid, and were a complete nightmare. If you are considering which to get, go with this WD drive every time.

Pros: Tons of storage, I liked the first one so much that I bought a second. I'll be installing this one in my Linux workstation for running virtual machines. Very fast, HD Tune reported 81.7 avg transfer rate, and 14.7ms avg seek time. That's quick enough to be a boot drive if you ask me. And this comes from a company that doesn't have firmware issues. I've bought over a dozen WD drives over the past two years and have not had a single problem with any of them. Always a safe bet.

Cons: I don't any spiffs for being the most avid WD fan in existence.

Other Thoughts: I just can't wait for WD to put out a 500gb 7200rpm laptop drive, then I'll be set.

Pros: Quiet and cool.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Mark's comments about the load cycle issue only apply to the first generation EACS drives. They don't apply to the second generation EACS or these new EADS drives. Also the issue is with using them with Linux, not raid.

SMART is reporting a high number of load cycles for my first generation EACS drive (I also have the other 2 generations). I have had no problems at all with the drive, but I'm about to replace it this new 1.5 TB drive because I need more space and the load cycle issue does concern me a little bit.

Pros: This drive has been flawless thus far. It's been scanned with a laptop running XP for bad blocks over external USB enclosure. It's been formatted in Gentoo Linux as ext3 (external USB enclosure). It's been reformatted in an external NAS enclosure (as ext2). This drive has been perfect for my general backup purposes. I plan a second one in the near future to run the NAS in RAID-1.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: Better than my recently failed Seagate 1TB. The other 1TB Seagate (same model as the failed drive) is showing signs of failure, as well. Both Seagates are under a year old. Only had one failed WD. Looking at my third failed Seagate.