WHich 2TB is more reliable: Seagate LP or WD Green?

I'm using 6 of the Seagate ST32000542AS (firmware CC32) in a RAID6 in a NAS.

Of course, I read plenty of ugly reviews between the WD green and this LP, finally went with the Seagate after reading simply about the head parking after brief no access.

I have a 1TB green in an external enclosure and notice large access times if it's idle (as previous post mentioned)

That said, I prolly woulda gone with the WD greens (price, noise, heat, power) - If they weren't for a raid set up

Anyways, I bought 2 spares when I installed them, but so far so good

[~] # uptime
09:53:47 up 25 days, 9:34, load average: 0.08, 0.05, 0.00

I bought two of the original 750GB WD GP drives 18 months ago, and despite the aggressive head parking, there's no reliability problems with either drive yet. And I use one for data backup, and the other for a boot drive in a main machine.

If you're just selecting a data/backup drive, you've got no worries with GP because it will only load/unload those heads a couple times a day. I guess you might be worried if this is for a boot drive, but here is a thread on SPCR with more detailed information (they tend to get into these silent drives more).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...er=asc&start=0

My take from the above thread: most people are seeing well under 1000 cycles per-week, and that means they won't hit the design life for 5 years or more. Since very few hard disks are used for this long (they start to get too slow to be useful, or fail), 5+ years life on start/restart is reasonable.

Decided to get a WD Green 2TB. Hopefully heavy torrenting on it doesn't harm it too much..

Originally Posted by lobski2

Decided to get a WD Green 2TB. Hopefully heavy torrenting on it doesn't harm it too much..

Good drive, good choice.

Originally Posted by PC_User

Good drive, good choice.

Hopefully you're right, and using it just as a data dump +torrenting won't cause problems long term.

Originally Posted by lobski2

Hopefully you're right, and using it just as a data dump +torrenting won't cause problems long term.

Why would it? It's a perfectly efficient storage/drive.

Originally Posted by PC_User

Why would it? It's a perfectly efficient storage/drive.

I'm still worried about the (slight) "myth" with head parking.

Originally Posted by lobski2

I'm still worried about the (slight) "myth" with head parking.

I think its either a myth or the issue has been resolved. I have 2 WD10EADS drives. The one that I have had for almost a year (power on time of 2040 hours) shows a Load Cycle Count of 404, which isn't nearly as high as others have been reporting.

Whether you are able to completely disable the spin-down using wdidle3 depends on the version of the drive you have.

From my experience:

WD20EADS 00s2b0, firmware version 04.05G04: was able to disable park timer completely
WD20EADS 00R6B0, firmware version 01.00A01: when attempting to disable timer, simply lowers it from 8s to 6.3s.

The first 3 drives in my array are 00s2b0. I disabled the spin down and haven't seen any problems in my RAID array. I just got a fourth drive in which is 00R6b0, and have set the time timer to 25.5 seconds (max allowed). We'll see if I have as good luck with this one! From what I've heard, people have had better results with the 00R6b0 models.

just set it to 25.5ms and let the drive work as intended imo.

I read on a forum somewhere that using WDIDLE on consumer green drives voids the warranty. Is there any truth to that?

I am a MAXIMUM supporter of WDC drives.I have experienced so many failures and issues with almost all Seagate 7200rpm drives and have never ever taken a liking to Hitachi or Samsung for poor RMA's and lackluster speed/reliability.

I personally own 70 WDC hard drives, not all can be listed, the biggest are in my sig.
I have 6 1TB WD10EAVS (8mb cache) in a RAID5 with no issues. (drives are stock with no TLED manually set)
Out of around 18 WD5000AAKS-00TMA and one or two 00YGA's I have only had 1 failure in the 2-3years I have owned these 500's.
I have never had a Raptor failure.

So that is my conclusion, based on lots of drives and little failures and no DOA's and *no* faulty firmware (Seagate grrr) and dramatically improving reliability (after a small slump in late 2006-2007). Western Digital drives are all I will *ever* trust my data on.