WD Green WD30EZRX 3TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: This drive has a very low energy consumption compared to others that I have used. It is whisper quite and runs very cool to the touch. I think it is well priced considering its capacity and features. I like the fact that this is a WD drive because I have not owned this drive for long enough to praise it on it's reliability but the fact that it was made by a company who has been in the business of manufacturing hard drives for years with a great record is somewhat of a comfort to me. I have owned 4 WD drives in the past, 2 of which died near the end of their warranty. WD warrants their drives based on the production date that is printed on the front of the drive. In my case the drives were out of warranty but WD does update the warranty to the time of sale if you provide proof of purchase. It was a real treat to log into my Newegg account and retrieve all the necessary info very quickly. I have also noticed that the bottom of the hard drive where the logic board is located has many new safety design features implemented. One being is that the logic board does not have any resistors, chips or other protruding components that can easily break during handling and electrical connections are sealed off with this pinkish plastic/rubbery coating (Newegg needs to update their photos of the drive).

Cons: This is probably the hardest section to comment on when you are pleased with the product. This drive from what I have gathered is intended to function as a secondary drive for storage/backup of large movies, music libraries, data etc and for that it is awesome. It also runs cool and saves you money on your electric bill but it is not intended for use as a primary drive or as a raided drive. Even WD on its website does not recommend raiding these drives. This is not really a con if you get this drive for the right purpose. In my case I have a SSD for my primary drive but due to size and price limitations a secondary drive such as this one is ideal for storing all my junk ;) . This drive has a lower spindle speed of just 5,400rpm, compared to the normal 7,200rpm of a normal desktop disk. Western Digital has implemented caching algorithms designed to mitigate the performance reduction that results from this. My 500GB 7200 rpm Hitachi deskstar runs a lot slower than this puppy so it really works and if I hadn't read about it I would not have even noticed that it is a lower rpm drive, however, its slow spin speed makes an impact on its performance in small file transfers but not that much.

Overall Review: This drive arrived in a plain Newegg box with peanuts and the bare drive in a electrostatic bag. It does not come with manuals, cd's, sata cables or anything else other than the drive itself. When handling any computer parts it is wise to have a wrist strap and be properly grounded if you do not have one you can always touch your case to discharge any static you might be carrying. I always like to wash my hands with detergent as in the past I had some issues with components acting up due to oily residue I left on the connectors with my fingers. I use this drive in a docking station, but it can be mounted inside your case or in an external enclosure, its low heat is great due to the fact that there will be a lesser chance of any kind of condensation inside the enclosure that can potentially damage your drive. I do a lot of overclocking and overall case temperatures are important to me so this drive is a real blessing. Make sure you plug in your drive to the correct sata connector on your motherboard that supports its features, if you are using this as a primary drive and are installing an OS on it make sure that you set your bios setting either to IDE or ACHI depending on what you need. Mine is set to ACHI. Once the drive is connected and you have booted into your OS it will need to be initialized as the system will not see it. Start button -->type in computer management and select it from list then navigate to Storage -->disk management and a initialize disk popup of some sorts should show up this is using Windows 7. Once you have done that you will see something like 1863.02 mb unallocated space, right click and set up your disk with the MBR option as this is a disk under 2TB. The final disk space you will be left with is 1.81 TB.
ATTO benchmark:
Hitachi desktar 500GB 7200 rpm
Write peak: 94853 mb/s
Read peak: 93368 mb/s

WD Green 2TB
Write peak: 149407 mb/s
Read peak: 156370 mb/s

I transferred several movies with average size of 1.4 GB from one drive to this one and the transfer was at 255 mb/s and completed within seconds. Overall I give this product a 5 star rating on the Fox scale ;)

If you found my review informative and helpful please click the Yes button underneath thx, till next time.

Pros: Green power saving features do kick in & shut off the drive for extreme power saving settings but also the drive weighs in with reduced rotational speeds to help tailor towards the power conscious among us.

The drive itself is very quiet & runs cool as well. Running with the
WD10EZRX installed & a spin up time of 4.1 seconds in a full tower case, 8 core CPU, 16GB ram running Windows Server 2012 x64 standard @ idle the ambient system temp maintained 18.8° C or 65.84° F (with hard drive running) & /w test area temp set @ 68° F.) The case pretty much held /w the room's temp but the drive itself had an internal hot zone of 24°C 75.2°F, still impressive performance compared to WD's Black line including 250GB, 500GB, & 1TB models so you will see some heat/power savings in that area with the Green lines. While hand hot-swapping the drive is cold cold to the touch which follows suit with it's larger 2TB WD green cousins installed above & below it.

Some quick stats on the drive presented honorable results which are well within the expected SATA 3.0 results combined with a drive promoting Green technology.(see Other Thoughts)

Cons: Drive failed to be recognized by & failed installation of the following OS: Fedora core 17-32/64bit, 18a-64, FreeNAS 32/64, OpenSuse12/32

OS that I had on hand & tried that would work with the WD10EZRX are:
Windows Server 2012 Standard/64, Windows 8/64.

It made no difference in AHCI/RAID/IDE mode on the SATA buses & further received same errors when using USB2 & USB3, (/w slightly better results using USB2.0 as the data bus for the drive), so Windows 8/64 and Server 2012/64 on sata it was.

Most of the Linux flavors complained about I/O errors from the device & streamed about 2 pages of errors when trying to access the drive. Initially I believed it was an Advanced Format issue but tests show that the drive is using the standard 512k config. I'm suspecting possible power terminology between the Linux OS and WD green may have been speaking a different language /w each other & not getting far as a result.

Further frustration & experience /w WD support not to mention getting support software has shaken my trust in WD as a customer oriented company /w their favorite prevailing phrase being "that's not typical" regarding their performance or service. It is unfortunate that I've encountered the non-typical more often than I'd like but WD has come through & made good /w some arm twisting. As a note fellow consumers: Watch your registrations & warranty info, if you replace drives, do make sure they don't shortchange your 2,3,5 year warranty /w a 90 day on the replacements as some don't pay attention when sending replacements out to you with what warranty duration item you sent in to them.

Beware when trying to get software support. As a customer be prepared to navigate a looping labyrinth of webpages & prohibitive download sections despite being logged in. I have posted a help guide in WD's forum which is pushing 2000 unique views & growing in just 8 months from frustrated customers. No fixes by the WD web team seem to have had any impact on addressing the access issue nor quelling the complaints, be sure have a drink & a stress ball ready if you try going for Advanced Format software and the like.

Overall Review: Additional drive details of supported features include:
SMART,48-bit addressing, Read Look-Ahead, Write Cache, Host Protected Area, Device config

Overlay, Firmware upgradeable, Security Mode, Power management, Interface Power

Management, Power-up in Standby, SCT Tables & NCQ Native Command Queuing.

But interestingly enough it lacked Automatic Acoustic Management (possibly locked in ON

position by firmware), Advanced power management & of course not much need for TRIM on

non-SSD drive. My particular drive arrived with FW Ver 01.01A01 with a sector size

configured as the standard 512bytes

Using HD Tune Pro 5.00 I saw the following transfer numbers read /write
Min 67.4 - 70.0 MB/s
Max 156.9 MB/s
Average 118.6-119.4 MB/s
Burst Rate transfer of 206.0 - 209.1 MB/s
CPU utilization of 2.4-3.6% (on an 8 core system)

(Transfer size, Operations/Sec , Avg access, Max, Avg Speed)
512bytes, 56, 17.665 ms, 391.189 ms, 0.028 MB/s
4kb , 59, 16.923 ms, 31.672 ms, 0.231 MB/s
64kb , 55, 17.996 ms, 33.446 ms, 3.473 MB/s
1Mb , 33, 29.419 ms, 50.823 ms, 33.991 MB/s
Random , 42, 23.567 ms, 46.491 ms, 21.529 MB/s

With CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64
1000MB transfer Read/Write MB/s:
Sequential@163.0/161.6
512k@0.000/0.000 (too fast for it to measure)
4k@0.567/1.950
4KQD32@1.830/1.834

With Parkdale v2.83
1000Mbyte /w 1Mb allocation unit
Read 153.6 MB/s @ 31.91ms
Write 153.6 MB/s @ 8.04ms

With Parkdale v2.83
1000Mbyte /w 64Kb allocation unit (Windows standard)
Read 152.3MB/s @32.15ms
Write 150.7MB/s @ 8.27ms

Other notable info /w block transfer test
With read block transfer set @ 4000 / access linear
Had an impressive
Max of 390 MB/s
Low of 45 MB/s
Avg of 280 MB/s overall