Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green - WD20EADS

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plaus

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I'm planning to get me one of these 2TB drives and since the reviews seem to be pretty good I'm almost certain that I want one.
But just to mke sure I'm making a post here for some personal opinions.

Are these 2TB hdds good? What are the cons?
Do they also suffer from a lot of disk failures like when the first 1,5TB came on the market? Cause other than a friend knowing someone working someplace who reported that a lot of these disk fails I don't seem to come across any other msgs that confirm this.

In the end I just wanna know to go for a 2TB one or a 1,5TB one. It's my last sata slot on my motherboard so I wanna make good use of it and have some time before having to start building my NAS and raid setup etc. I have exams so I could use some data breathing space for the month to come :p
 
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The 1.5s were the Seagate ones, caused by an off-by-one error in the firmware, which caused the drive to get into an inoperable state. The WD drives don't suffer from these problems.
I've had 4 WD Green (ACS, not ADS) drives working well since last August, no problems to speak of. Very quiet, though they do tend to park their heads sometimes, the most noticeable effect of this is if you're playing a large MP3 file, and then seek from 26 to 35 minutes in, it'll pause for about half a second as the head unparks and it seeks to the correct location.
 
Only con I can see is cost, for the cost of the 2tb drive you can buy 2x1.5tb drives.
 
Enlefo said:
Only con I can see is cost, for the cost of the 2tb drive you can buy 2x1.5tb drives.
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But if you only had 2 drive slots available you'll only have 3 GBs total ;), but if you get the 2TBs you'll have more.

Either ways, for the cost:space ratio it's not worth it yet...that's just me ;)
 
$250 for a 2 TB drive
uses one of your motherboard sata ports
or
Two 1.5 TB drives + cheap pci sata controller
uses no sata ports on your motherboard

you should be able to find a 1.5 TB drive on sale for $120 or lower, plus the cost of the sata controller, it would cost about $15 more than the 2 TB drive alone, but you would add 2 sata ports to your computer and get 3 TB, and you'll still have available sata ports to add another drive in the future when needed to delay your need for building an NAS

That's what I'd do anyways, I just can't justify the cost of the additional 500 GB on a single disk over a 1.5 TB drive.
Maybe if money wasn't an object & for some reason I absolutely needed to spend that much more to get the additional storage/space ratio.
 
I would go for it. The green 2tb drive seems to be quite promising. Ideally if you are running raid, you should get a different drive, but if you are using WHS or no raid you should be golden
 
I read in a few places a little while ago that the TLER utility caused the WD20EADS drives to read as 1TB. However that may have changed (but I imagine it would require an update to the TLER utility). A quick google seems to be fairly inconclusive, but a more thorough search might yield some extra info.
 
Got one when they were first released, it's been working great since then. I've never seen the 'head parking' issue, on mine MP3s and Movies seek instantly. Could've got two 1.5TB drives, but I wasn't going to touch a seagate drive with a 10 foot pole at that time.
 
Ive got a WD10EADS. Just to let you guys know, with the newer WD Green drives (EADS), the heads still park after 8 seconds of inactivity, but does not get recorded into SMART.
 
90-100MB/s is acceptable for a storage drive IMO. The access times are awful so I wouldn't recommend installing your OS on it. But access times don't matter for large sequential reads/writes, which is mainly all my drive is used for. I have a Velociraptor for the OS, apps and games.

I have one of the first drives off the line (serial #669) and FWIW it has 53 bad sectors. I ran every diagnostic/surface scan I could find and didn't find any new ones. It's been about a month since I discovered them and the count hasn't budged since. The drive otherwise works flawlessly, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
 
so does TLER work on the 2.0tb drives? i know it does on the 1.5tb drives just fine.
 
I have four WD10EADS myself. Lovely drives. Got two for $80 shipped each, and the other two for $88.50 shipped each. I'm waiting for the 15EADS and 20EADS to drop to around $.085/GB.
 
will someone please let me know if TLER works on these now? i have to get rid of these seagate 1.5tb's due to raid card incompatibility and want to make sure i'm ok :)
 
pgjensen said:
will someone please let me know if TLER works on these now? i have to get rid of these seagate 1.5tb's due to raid card incompatibility and want to make sure i'm ok :)
Click to expand...

They still have the same issue as the other green drives. You will need to disable TLER or buy a RE edition.
 
you mean enable TLER right? so it responds in 7 seconds to the RAID card to avoid timeout?
 
TLER does in fact work on these drives. My 1680ix-24 SAS RAID card has treated them with care thus far without any timeout errors (like i got on seagate desktop drives).
 
pgjensen said:
TLER does in fact work on these drives. My 1680ix-24 SAS RAID card has treated them with care thus far without any timeout errors (like i got on seagate desktop drives).
Click to expand...
That's good to hear since the Seagate 1.5tbs are out.

At least there's an option. I think I'm still going to wait and see what the RE4-GPs and/or what the Constellation ES are goin to be selling for.
 
yeah i got them pretty cheap so it was worth it to me.

i imagine the RAID drives will be selling above $250 for a while, which is just not worth it to me.
 
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