Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Quiet, fairly reliable

Cons: Not perfectly reliable -- 2 out of 8 have failed after 2 years of use.

Other Thoughts: We use 8 of these drives in a sotware RAID that is used make make nightly backups of other servers. So far, we've had about 2 failures in over 2 years since they were deployed, which isn't too bad.

Pros: None

Cons: Not working out of box. Will not format. Keep getting I/O errors. Tried 3 different machines. RMA'd

Other Thoughts: I was bummed that this didn't work as I have always thought highly of Western Digital HDD's Hopefully the replacement will work.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Green, as this is not the typical experience with the product. We are very sorry to hear that your drive did not function so soon after it was delivered. Western Digital does rigorously test and verify all of our drives, prior to shipping, with burn-in and diagnostic tests. We stand behind our warranty for the duration of the products provided warranty period, and as such, we are here to support our products regardless of the circumstances. We would like to assure you that what you have experienced is extremely abnormal. We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: My first TB HD. Very good promo price @89.99 for 2TB and the usual secure packing, prompt shipping.
Intel mobo (DH67BLB3) bios read/recognized the drive w/o any problems. Benchmarks, chkdsk tests from popular disk utils were within specs & good health.
Miscell note - installed it using round SATA III cable.
Easy to rout and bundle, checkout the cable section for some good selections.

Cons: None so far. Regrettable reading the doa, failure comments. Always had good luck with them ( WDC blue/green series ) and the last hd issue I had was an open box purchase which was a chancy choice I took a few years ago.
Other than that, batting average has been and still is excellent.

Other Thoughts: As mentioned, this is my first TB hard drive. I held off buying TB sizes because of tech articles/review criticism and mostly due to pricing. I was lucky to stock up on Newegg shell shocker deals before the Thailand flood.
One of the nicer deals was a Western Digital Caviar Green WD7500AARS 750GB $39.99 @6/2011
It just passed the 2500 power on hours mark and running fine.
I finally switched over to SSDs to run the Win XP and Win 7 x64 family pcs last year when their prices dropped within my budget range but expect to get plenty of mileage worth from the reg hds.
I still have Maxtor MB drives from the mid 90's running in USB external enclosures.
Obviously they'll never match the speed of current drives, but these clunkers are still useful for archiving.

Pros: Very quiet and very fast. BIG storage. Reliable.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Great drives for DVR and servers.

Pros: Bright green label

Cons: instability, frequent drive failures, worst quality drive I have seen from WD since the 1990's.

Other Thoughts: We've purchased over a dozen of these over the past 6 months to use in test machines at work. To date, we've had to RMA ALL BUT 2 OF THEM. In my opinion, this is WD's equivalent of Windows Milenium Edition. We encountered sector write errors from the start. Low level formats and running checkdisk didn't to anything to fix the issue. As soon as we ran the checkdisk and low level formats, other sectors started failing. These have proven too unstable for any functional use beyond a paperweight or something to toss at a co-worker's head when you want to knock them unconscious.

We haven't had the same issues with WD blue or black drives, and haven't tested the red drives yet.

To sum it up, GREEN is the color you turn when this drive goes belly-up and you lose your data.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Green, as this is not the typical experience with the product. It is unfortunate that you have experienced a drive failure, as our drives are all rigorously tested to ensure they are in good working condition before leaving our warehouse. There are many variables that could affect the drives integrity between leaving our warehouses prior to being installed in a computer. We recommend installing and running our Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows (WinDLG) utility for Windows users, or running Disk Utility for Mac users. Information regarding our WinDLG utility and Disk utility can be found at the following link.
How to test a drive for problems using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Win
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/940
How to test a drive for defects or problems on a Mac
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/866
Regardless of the reason for your drives defect, we stand by our product, and would like to replace your drive for you directly.
How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device or your experience. You may contact us at 1 800) 275-4932, or via our support website at the link below. http://websupport.wdc.com/rdsfdc.asp?linktype=home&portaltype=wd&custtype=end&fs=&ss=&lang=en Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: I went to Dairy Queen when I returned it to *Burp* Buy.

Cons: The first WD drive I ever used that refused to format. Low level, drive manager, two machines internally, one eSATA external, one USB external.

Other Thoughts: I've been building since the mid-90's, using predominately WD. These new "Green" drives are a mystery. They're marketed as Advanced Format Drives (AFD) on the WD site, but they're not AFD per the WD Acronis Align tool. Juuusst a bit of a misrep there, 'eh? But I wouldn't care if the dam thing formatted. WD support page says "try a quick format." Heh..sure. It "quick formats" and actually writes data, but who wants to trust it when it doesn't complete a full format?

Especially with that generous 2 year warranty giving
'ya buckets of confidence. (Bought mine in April '12, it was manufactured in October '12) I'll pass on this one.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Green, as this is not the typical experience with the product. It is unfortunate that you have experienced a drive failure, as our drives are all rigorously tested to ensure they are in good working condition before leaving our warehouse. There are many variables that could affect the drives integrity between leaving our warehouses prior to being installed in a computer. We recommend installing and running our Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows (WinDLG) utility for Windows users, or running Disk Utility for Mac users. Information regarding our WinDLG utility and Disk utility can be found at the following links.
How to test a drive for problems using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Win
http://bit.ly/mE9Fjo
How to test a drive for defects or problems on a Mac
http://bit.ly/kTV4cj
Regardless of the reason for your drives defect, we stand by our product, and would like to replace your drive for you directly.
How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty
http://bit.ly/Anlqmn
Please note that your WD Green is an Advance Format hard drive. Advanced Format drives will format properly on Windows Vista systems or later, without the need for the AF tool. By using the Acronis Alignment Tool on Windows XP, you can fix the alignment on the drive. Please follow the link below for more information on advance format.
Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility
http://bit.ly/lmIOQV
Is there anything we can do for you at this time? You may contact us at 1 800) 275-4932, or via our support website at the link below.
http://bit.ly/MZqham
Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: 1) Price per TB: I got this at $89.99 sale (so you should look for a lower price as I have since seen Seagate 2TB 64MB Cache with 7200 RPM)

2) Low Power Consumption: This is the whole point of the green line. If you do not care about power consumption, then this may not be for you.

3) Large Storage per disk: My on-board RAID controller only fits 5 disks so I needed as much space per disk as I could reasonable purchase. I got three of these but that leaves me room to expand.

Cons: Just 1) WD intentionally hides the RPMs on this disk. Go the their site and you will not find the speed. The are marketing a drive that self adjusts to run at the lowest RPM to get the job done. This is how they make it a low power consumption (Green) drive. In my opinion, this is only a con and worthy of dropping an egg because WD does not come right out and explain it. You have to go and research on your own to discover this. So to be clear, the -1 Egg and con is based on WD concealing the truth; not the truth itself.

Other Thoughts: I am running these in RAID 0 to get and advantage on the speed while taking advantage of the lower power. If you plan to run RAID 5, I would think it best to get 5 disks to get over the performance drop

Pros: It is quiet, energy efficient, and cool. The 64MB cache makes this a fast drive. It is inexpensive.

This Green 2TB drive is replacing a Black 1TB drive that I use as one of my backup drives. The Black drive has 32MB cache. For large files (greater than 1GB), the 64MB cache of the Green drive makes it faster than the Black drive, but for smaller files, it is slower.

The old drive was almost full, and I cloned it to make the swap seamless. The WD website has Acronis True Image, but I use DriveImage XML on a BartPE boot disk. I have used the WD Acronis version, and it works well. DriveImage XML is slow, but it is reliable.

This drive is used for Windows 7 Backup files, and it is over half filled. The Windows 7 Previous Versions feature is able to locate files substantially faster. Every night, the backup runs, and I have a lot of files with multiple previous versions.

The drive is installed internally, and there is never a delay when I access it. Using Windows 7 Previous Versions, it is much faster than the Black drive.

Overall, I am very satisfied, and I will purchase another.

Cons: I did not have any problems, but the high number of DOA drives is concerning. From the comments, there are not many drive failures for running drives. If your drive is not DOA, it should be OK.

Mine has been running for three weeks without a hiccup.

Other Thoughts: Due to the high DOA comments, I tried to stress the drive. I ran the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic and Windows Checkdisk several times over the past three weeks. No errors or bad sectors were reported.

This drive is using my last free SATA port. This is a SATA2 (3.0Gb/s), but for a storage/backup drive, speed is not an issue. If your motherboard has a mix of SATA versions, you may want to use a slower port.

WD does not recommend using this as a primary drive, but if you are willing to accept the limitations, it is possible.

I have been very satisfied with the performance, and I intend to start replacing my older storage/backup drives with Green ones. With 5 internal and 3 external drives (additional backups), I need to lower my energy use.

Pros: Very quiet.
Nearly as fast as my brand new WD Blue drive.
Pretty good price to storage ratio.
Amazingly low power usage, about half that of my Blue drive.

I transferred a folder full of movie and game ISO's from my 1TB WD Blue drive to this one, and the transfer speed stayed above 130 MB/s the entire time.

I used a program called "Barts Stuff Test", which fills the entire disk, then reads the file and calculates read/write speeds. The entire process took about 8 hours, and during that time the hard drive never went more than 2 F above ambient temperature.
Read and Write speeds were pretty constant across the entire disk;
Max read speed was 150 MB/s, average was 120.
Max write speed was 154 MB/s, average was 125.

I have been transferring some of my bigger files which were cluttering up my main hard drive onto this one, and I am very pleased with the write speeds on this drive.

Cons: No installation instructions (not a big deal).
Not quite fast enough for gaming.

Other Thoughts: This drive would be perfect for backup or secondary storage. I plan on putting it in an external enclosure and using it for just that. It would work very well for low power applications, and is also very quiet.
I would also definitely recommend it if you just need a large, cheap hard drive.

Pros: newegg's RMA department

Cons: DOA

Other Thoughts: Yet another drive that was DOA. I've been building systems for > 20 years and the last two are by far the worst in history for drive reliability. 5-10% of the drives I get from newegg are DOA. Another 30-40% don't last a year. Probably close to 75% are dead by 2 years. With all the drive manufacturers dropping their warranty to 1 year, I foresee great profit in the data recover and backup markets.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the WD Green, as this is not the typical experience with the product. There are many variables that could amount to a drive emitting unusual sounds when powered on. To test our drives health, we have our Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows (WinDLG) utility, and Mac users can of course use Disk Utility and First Aid. For information on how to use the WinDLG utility, please view the information provided by the following link.
How to tell if the noise or sound the drive is making is normal
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/568
How to test a drive for problems using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/940
How to test a drive for defects or problems on a Mac
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/866
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device or your experience. You may contact us at 1 800) 275-4932, or via our support website at the link below. http://websupport.wdc.com/rdsfdc.asp?linktype=home&portaltype=wd&custtype=end&fs=&ss=&lang=en Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.