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: WD quality. Product nicely packaged and no damage: -QUIET, QUIET ... very quiet! -quickly initiated and formatted with Win 7 -Sata III speed (backward compatible) -WD Intellipower rotation speed (~ 5400 rpm) -quick startup and operation -buffer to host (6 GB/s) to/from drive, sustained (150 MB/s) -64mb cache -energy efficient , low heart generation -two year limited warranty

Cons: No identifiable product cons from this installation and review

Overall Review: Interesting niche, "Green," touting environmentally conscious hard drives? No problem recommending this drive in the service it is intended ... low power storage. Online research confirms that earlier models had problems, although more recent iterations appear more reliable. Users are impressed with low noise and low operating temperatures, but remain wary of history. User comments also indicate that some people are using this drive as a bootable primary hard drive or in RAID service, ignoring WD's intended application usage and warnings. Potential buyers would do well to review description and specifications of WD drives to get a better understanding of intended applications. They are easily obtainable online: Enter WD10ZRX in your Brower to open WD's information sheet on this drive, then open the PDF specifications document and read Product Features and Applications. Want to compare Black and Green? Then do a similar search for WD1002FAEX in your Browser. A twenty dollar differential separates the two but the difference in use is very significant. Comparison of energy/noise produced in WD Black 1 TB vs WD Green 1 TB drives: Model: WD1002FAEX (Black 5yrs) WD10EZRX (Green 2yrs) Energy: Read/Write (W) 6.8 3.8 Idle 6.1 2.6 Standby/Sleep 0.7 0.6 Noise: Idle (dBA) 28 21 Seek mode 33 22 Watts (W) and average decibels (dBA) The human ear can typically distinguish musical sound between 20 - 20,000 Hertz. Noise is measured in decibels (dB). Zero (0) dB is the lower end whereas 150 dB would represent the roar of a jet engine. A quiet library or whispering is roughly 30 dB; whereas a conversation is typically 60 dB. These two drives are quiet, especially the Green drive. Adding typical ambient noise of your office or computer room makes it even more difficult to hear or distinguish either of these hard drives in operation as they disappear in the background noise. Green hard drives are more energy efficient and are literally designed for use as "secondary drives" (think quiet: medical facilities, HTPC hard drive storage, external hard drive on the top of one's desk, secondary drive in PC, etc.). These drives are also expected to see much idle, standby, and sleep time. Operating in their recommended service will help assure they meet or exceed their two year warranty period. I installed the WD Green drive in an external eSata II enclosure on my desk top and you can't hear it. It literally disappears in the background noise. It's easier to look at the blinking enclosure light to witness its' operation! With Sync Toy 2.1 (64bit) in my Win 7 system, I routinely sync critical files, pictures and data between three drives (source and two storage drives). With Sata II/III equipment, the syncing occurs almost instantaneously and the Green drive does not disappoint. I have purchased numerous hard drives over the years and WD has represented itself well. I always pay attention to manufacturer

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

Pros: 1. Extremely quiet 2. Runs Cool 3. 64MB Cache 4. Plug an Play

Cons: 1. Not Fastest Drive on the Market (But your getting way more than you pay for)

Overall Review: With Parkdale I was able to get some read speeds of 27.7 MB and write speed of 31.9 on USB 2.0 and I was able to get 145.8 read with 146.4 using the internal Sata. So although not the fastest drive I have ever used it is one of the quietest drives that I have not been able to hear. ;) I would recommend this drive to anyone looking for some serious storage room that is is going to be quiet, stays cool and best of all not going to break the bank! I have had quite a few WB drives in my tinkering days and I have to say I have never been disappointed. I had it just sitting on my desk with a drive adapter while I did all the speed test, it never once got hot ( And I ran some serious info through it ) and that's with out any type of cooling! When I first turned it on I thought that it was a DOA because of how quiet it was, I have several WB raptors which are screamers and some blues that aren't exactly the quietest so I was expecting something close with the green but not even close! After the tests that I preformed on the where done I put it in my NAS and it has been extremely nice to have another 2TB to compare to. The drive that I previously had in the NAS was a Seagate 2TB which honestly has given me no problems but I never knew how loud it was until I stuck the green in there. ( There is not a sound coming from that NAS anymore! ) And like I said for those that are looking for a lot of space and don't need the fastest read and writes this is the drive! Check back in month, I'll be doing a follow up! ( First impressions are great but with a drive its the long haul that counts )

Pros: Low power consumption. Very quiet. Runs very cool (even during protracted and sustained read and writes). 2 year warranty. Excellent choice for a secondary drive for storing data.

Cons: The drive is slow… Not horribly Slow… But slow. Not the choice for a primary drive running OS and programs

Overall Review: This drive is ideal in my opinion for its intended use: “Quiet, Low Power, Economical DATA Storage”. I currently use 1 and 2TB platter drives to archive digital images and this one is going into the rotation with about 12 other drives of varied models and makes. In the future Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB drives will be what I’m using. I did a little “stress test” on this drive by sticking it in a dock and writing nearly 1.7 terabytes of image data to it all in one shot. The sustained write time was @ 110 to 120 MB/s (Notably lower than the advertised 145 MB/s but I can cut WD some slack because I honestly don’t know how much the drive dock chokes the signal) which is kind of pretty slow anyway but what was remarkable is you could handle the drive without getting blisters which is something of a shock considering how hot some of these drives get under those conditions… So… I formatted, and did this two more times in a row just for good measure. The drive truly runs cool and even sitting there on my desk in the open it was difficult to discern any noise whatsoever. Currently it is installed in the big box that is my “Digital Dark Room” slowly loading up with RAW images to be archived once it is full… Unlike some of the drives I've used for this same purpose, I hardly notice it’s there.

Pros: tons of capacity Runs cool and quiet surprisingly fast and responsive Works exactly how a hard drive should variable RPM speed (IntelliPower) 6.0Gb/s data transfer speeds Very low power consumption

Cons: I suppose the only con that I can see would be the lack of information on exactly what speeds the IntelliPower can run on. I've read a few things stating that IntelliPower has a range of between 5000-5900RPM, kinda slow for today's standards

Overall Review: I was originally skeptical of Western Digital's new "IntelliPower" hard drives, but I must say after using and testing the harddrive's performance I am very happy with the results. Transfer rates are pretty typical of any mechanical hard drive, I moved 260GB of random data spanning everything from movies, to games, to document files and programs. The total time was just over an hour at an average speed of 54Mb/s, which I was completely satisfied with. This particular drive which is supposed to run slower than an 7200RPM hard drive was actually faster than my older Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM. The biggest difference being that my Hitachi is 3.0Gb/s transfer speed so it would appear that the faster transfer rate of the Western Digital does make a significant difference even if it's max RPM is 5900. All in all this has been a welcome addition to my PC and provides me with a very large capacity of storage space, and lets face it in these High definition, high resolution times more storage is a must for any PC.

Pros: Good news is that both of my drives were not DOA :). Standard Western Digital Green drives with the exception of being 3TB. Nice 64MB cache on these drives. Super helpful with a drive this big I might add. Both of these drives are quiet. Currently taking up residence in a 2-bay NAS.

Cons: They seem like pretty slow drives but I'm sure that is mostly between the 3TB size and the low RPM.

Overall Review: Packaging was pretty good. Drives were in anti-static bags which were wrapped in bubble wrap and then placed in smaller boxes within a larger shipping box. I will post another review if I experience failures. These will be up almost all the time in a RAID1 in my NAS.

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.

Overall Review: 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.