I ordered a WD15EARS data drive for my XP-machine. Tuesday I can pick it up. Two days ago I discovered this forum. And I only do read very very very bad evaluations of this drive here. Is it because happy users don’t need this forum, or are the drives really that bad?
to be fair - whenever there is a problem (whatever the item/service); its a generally accepted assumption that for every person that complains there are likely to be 10 happy people.
That said - I have a 1.5 WD15EARS and am totally dissapointed - bad sectors and horrid issues with it dissapearing (using three different controllers and a USB box).
am currently trying to get the WD diags to prove is a POS and then RMA.
thats all I can say about it really
Can I conclude from your ‘three different controllers’, that you were using RAID? RAID and Caviar Green are not a happy marriage. I will use this drive pure as a single (non-RAID) data drive, will this make perspectives better? And since WD doesn’t read this forum, which alternative can you advice me? :robottongue:
No RAID - single drive (purchased as a backup for one of my ST1500 drives). Intended to get three more but as this ‘trial’ one is awful I will be switching to enterprise class disks from now on (I should have never gone down to desktop drives in the first place)…
Ive had this drive running on ICH10R, JMicron and Silicon Image controllers (first two on the same system and the SIL on my other machine). Also had it in an IcyBox external USB enclosure and is currently sat in an Akasa eSATA through the external port of the SIL.
Ive tried many cables, drives on their own, all manner of drivers and no change 
I also have issue with a (two week old) ST32000 -diff issues but annoying as hell (that one is going back for a refund). all my other drives (Three ST1500 series, 2 RE2 500,s and an SSD are absolutely fine and the system has been runnig without error for nearly a year now).
1 Like
My 640GB Green freezing my system for a moment on write operations.
If you want to use it for multiple tasks it’s not good choice in my opinion. Old 250GB drive works 100% faster.
Why anyone didn’t write thta Green means VERY SLOW on disk specification ?
Funny way to make users more green thinking.
reactions only from new forummembers…
@hddrivemecrazy, Green Caviar is slow and therefore only for data / backup, I did know from reviews. Green means slow, you should know.
I just installed 4 into my Netgear ReadyNAS. I am getting dozens of SMART error alerts. After tranfering 12 movies, and 3000 pictures I have 86 SMART warnings. Just looking for some guidance.
I was - until yesterday. Then I got aware of the Hight Load Cycle problem.
:robotsad:
I did contact the WD-helpdesk this morning. Told them about this community. Told them what a bad advertisement this is. They suppose we all know/think that only people with problems (a minority of customers) visit this forum. I told them this community made me doubt my initial order.
Western Digital would like to look transparent by this community. They say this community is a service for your problems.
Green drives (as with most desktop type hard disks) are not really suited to RAID usage. You can get away with it sometimes but in general if there is a time-out the drive will likely be dropped from the array.
This is why enterprise (or RAID edition) disks are reccomended as they have TLER (a time out protection feature).
For RAID0/1 desktop drives usually behave but any other type and you will likely see drop outs (and maybe smart errors but not to sure on that).
As the other poster states - Green drives a well suited for backup disks or just plain storage, but not for RAID.
(Also the EARS version specifically isnt suited to current RAID controllers)…
I got two 5000AADS here and they work fine!
Just one problem when burning two DVDs concurrently drives are unable to maintain full buffers for burn speeds > 4x !
It appears my greens can’t handle that even a transfer rate test is showing 80+ MB/s? (Win7 / AHCI mode/ Ati 770 chipset)
if someone got an idea…?
Costabunny, you are confusing me. In your post on monday you stated you were not using RAID, but were still complaining. Now you say Green drives are well suited for backup disks or just plain storage, just not for RAID. :mansad:
I ordered a WD15EARS and a nice OCZ Vertex 60 gig SSD from newegg a few weeks back. After installing them and doing some initial performance checks on the WD15EARS, I spent the rest of the day focusing on the SSD, which gave me blazingly fast boot times after having LVM migrate my root filesystem over. I shut down at the end of the night and when I woke up in the morning, the WD15EARS was so dead my BIOS wouldn’t even POST. It just hung whenever it tried to detect the drive. Returned it to newegg at my bloody expense and I finally got the replacement the day before yesterday. So far I have just left it on all night running the long SMART test twice now ( takes 9.5 hours, jesus this is a huge drive! ). Hopefully this one lasts.
I am still working on the load/unload count problem.
I’m a little bit ashamed to say, but I love this slow drive. It feels like a solid rock. :robotindifferent:
O, yes, I forgot to answer: I’m a satisfied user :smileyvery-happy:
I did indeed say I was not using RAID - and yes I am unhappy with the APM (load/unload at high frequency).
These drives are not suited for RAID (As I said) - they are desktop drives and as such have a much longer timeout when a read error occurs (which most RAID controllers would consider the drive bad and drop from an array). (only enterprise class disks have a limited timeout to avoid this). I am not saying you cannot use them, just be aware of the timeout.
as a backup disk they are fine (for me I have had to disable all the APM functions to stop the high LLC increase).
WD15EARS wrote:
Costabunny, you are confusing me. In your post on monday you stated you were not using RAID, but were still complaining. Now you say Green drives are well suited for backup disks or just plain storage, just not for RAID. :mansad:
I have two of the 1.5GB EARS drives, purchased about two months ago. So far, so good. I bought them for backup/storage and knew exactly what I was getting. They are a bit slow but quiet. By comparison, a 2GB Hitachi drive I tried before getting these was 7200RPM and probably a lot faster, but under some load it sounded almost like a little lawnmower. I didn’t need the speed or the noise so I returned that one.
So far no S.M.A.R.T. errors on either EARS drive - though I admit, I haven’t used them heavily. I’ve written maybe 600GB to one, about 1TB to the other. So they’ve definitely gotten some use, just not daily and not heavily. But I’m long past the point where I rely on one hard drive to be my ONLY copy of anything - that’s why I bought two of these. Eventually one will be the mirror of the other. (A RAID with more expensive drives would have been overkill for what I use them for.)
Having simila rproblems. See my post on http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=41470&p=230968&hilit=ata+error#p230968. It looks like similar errrs are being seen with other western digital drives. Anybody come with any good ideas?
Well ladies and gentlemen I have been blessed. NEWEGG has agreed to refund my money for the four WD15EARS drives and the four WD10EARS drives I purchased from them so that I may purchase RAID capable drives. WHAT A GREAT COMPANY!!!
I’m the unhappy owner of two green drives - a EADS and a EARS.
The EADS would freeze, the HDD light on solid for up to 3 mins and then restart with no errors. It did this frequently and I since RMAed it. The EARS disk is only 1 month old and now it is giving me problems
This is from the logs (Ubuntu Linux)
[ 973.430970] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 973.430975] ata1.00: error: { UNC }
[ 973.436539] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 973.436564] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
[ 973.436568] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 973.436576] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
[ 973.436585] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
[ 973.436589] 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
[ 973.436605] 16 c9 fd 88
[ 973.436612] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
[ 973.436621] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 16 c9 fd 88 00 00 08 00
[ 973.436637] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 382336392
[ 973.436683] ata1: EH complete
I have an earlier moden WD10 Green in another machine, that seems to OK.
This is an absolute nightmare. Can lightning rearly strike twice?
I chose WD becuase Seagate had also had their problems, but at the moment I would not recommend these drives to anyone, they’re ■■■■.
