Single review: Western Digital WD Green 2TB 3.5" Internal HDD

Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Cool, quiet operation for efficient eco-conscious computing
Reduced power consumption
Eco-conscious design
2-year limited warranty

Not bad, not good. 12/12/2012

This review is from: Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros:

Big drive, price was worth it at the time. I bought mine in 07/2012. Not using it as a boot drive (its a green drive after all).

Cons:

As many have stated, this drive has a high rate of failure due to the constant parking of the heads (every 8 seconds by default). Another reviewer gave good advice about adjusting this using wdidle3.exe. However, to do this you need to boot your computer into DOS. Not Windows, not safe mode, but DOS (think Win98). And if you don't have a floppy drive laying around, this can be a P.I.T.A. Less technical folks won't want to bother with this.

Overall Review:

You can make a bootable flash drive, but honestly its easier if you just have a bootable floppy disk laying around (I can just see everyone laughing at that last part). You'll want to get the wdidle3.exe from WD and load it on the bootable media. Once that's done, you can use it to change that ridiculous head park time. The reviewer from 06/26/2012 said he had problems when disabling it completely, so he put it to the max (300 seconds) and had no more trouble.

Never one to fix what isn't broken, I did the same thing (300 max for the timer) and my drive's been fine so far. Its mostly storage, but I back up my system image and files to it once a week. I suppose only time will tell how long it lasts (good hard drives can last years). Guess we'll see.

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 you were experiencing issues related to the increased amount of head parking of the drive.
Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digital's Green, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles.
For more information, please see the links below:
The S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter keeps increasing on a SATA 2 hard drive
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5357
Western Digital does rigorously test and verify all of our drives, prior to shipping, with burn-in and diagnostic tests. As a troubleshooting step, we recommend running either our WINDLG diagnostics software or Macs built-in Disk Utility to check your drives health.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/940
We do stand behind our warranty and replacement policy and would appreciate the opportunity to replace your drive for you. Please click the following link for our replacement procedure.
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 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.

2 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes Yes / No

Daniel S.
Verified Owner
Owned For: 1 month to 1 year

write a review