WD introduces 3TB and 2.5TB green drives

[Thomphoolery]

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=866

$239 for the 3TB and $189 for the 2.5TB. Times are crazy.

-j

[Omegaman]

A couple caveats with these drives:

1) They are classified as "green" - meaning they use less power during the spin up process, etc.  In the computer industry, HDDs classified as green are actually slower in terms of seek times and read/write times with the "green" term used as a marketing ploy.  Almost all HDDs right now operate at 7200 RPMs with the VelociRaptors and other platter drives at 10,000 RPMs.  "Green" drives run at 5400 RPMs which has traditionally been used in laptops because of their low power consumption.  By these standards of "green" 90% of all hard drives installed in laptops and netbooks are green (non SSD).

2) Windows 7 (and previous versions) are limited by the size of its bootable partition.  If you attempt to install Windows on a 2.5TB or 3TB partition, Windows will give you and error message during installation.  MBR (Master Boot Record) partition tables are limited to about 2.2TB (not including the 100 MB system reserved partition used during Windows installation).  At this time the only way to break this barrier is to install Windows 7 64 bit version on a GPT partition from an EFI (UEFI) bootloader which Intel has proposed to hopefully replace our current PC BIOS.

Here are good and bad uses for these drives:

Good:

• Backup storage drives used alone or with a multi drive bay (Drobo, for example)
• Local storage for very large files for archiving only (videos/program files/game backups)
• For use with recording large video files such as for live recording of feeds, games, and internet streams to surveillance and webcam recordings

Not so good:

• As a bootup drive or bootable drive partition
• Storing of programs, applications, and games with large amounts of data being read, written, rewritten
• Storage used for streaming any type of high def content over your home entertainment system or other streaming media.

[Omegaman]

I should emphasize something of interest for comparison.

MBRs are limited to 2.2 TB (terabytes) or 2,200,000,000,000 bytes (SI)

GPTs are limited to 9.4 ZB (zettabytes) or 9,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (SI)
                                       

[Yoink]

9.4 ZB (zettabytes) or 9,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (SI)

Also that's cute with the RPM difference. I thought it was odd that they didn't list the RPM on the green drives on Newegg. Now I know why, heh.

[Oddjob]

Is the RPM difference caused by them being "green" or is them being green caused by the RPM difference?

[Omegaman]

Is the RPM difference caused by them being "green" or is them being green caused by the RPM difference?

They can manufacture 5400 RPM drives cheaper than higher speed drives.  These have pretty much been standard on almost all laptops in the last decade due to the lower power requirement of running them -- meaning less drain on a laptop battery.  I'm sure some nitwit in marketing decided to jump on the "green" bandwagon and saved the company money by creating high capacity, low RPM drives while selling environmental consciousness to the tree-huggers out there. 

Now these hard drive manufactures will argue that they've developed innovative technologies on controller chips to make the drives more efficient and "smarter" about how and when they use power.  I'm sure this is correct, but the underlying *main* difference between the drives is the much slower RPMs of the platters.

Understand too, the bigger issue at stake.  I would say the gross population of computers out there stay powered on far more than they are used.  Very few people (save laptop OS and BIOS energy saving profiles by default) even bother to "power down" components on their computers to save energy.  If people were *truly* concerned about the power consumption of their computers, they could go to (in Win7) Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options and then select "Change Plan Settings" next to either the Balanced or Power Saver profiles to define which power settings they can adjust.  As you can see after selecting "Advanced Power Settings" that you can adjust when certain components of your computer shut or power themselves down after a user defined length of time. 

Buying a "green" hard drive saves such a small amount of energy consumption vs. actually setting up realistic power settings on people's computers.  Activating these power down options of components in your computer will save tons more energy than forking out a couple hundred bucks for "green" drives, if your goal is to be environmentally conscious.

[Oddjob]

I know at least with the Monitor and Tower I purchased last Christmas that they are stepping into the green realm, after a set amount of time the Monitor itself says "hey I'm not being used, I'm gonna sleep now" and the computer was default set to something along the same duration(much shorter than the durations I had on previous computers).  I was really impressed when I actually figured out it was the Monitor and Tower differently doing this rather than the Monitor reacting to what the Tower said.

[Omegaman]

After further review...



Seagate was the first to produce a 3TB HD, but held releasing it in bulk due to limitations with OS and motherboards/BIOS, etc.  After actually seeing a retail box of the 3TB WD Caviar Green yesterday I was floored reading the box.  I did some investigating online and confirmed what I read on the box.

WD has found a quick and easy solution for those limitations on these high capacity drives (over 2.19 TB). WD has apparently started including in all of their 2.5TB and 3TB drives an an AHCI-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA) as a PCI Express add-in card (PCI-E 1X).



This will allow you to purchase one of these drives and boot from them.  You'll still need to format them in GPT instead of using an MBR, but the add-in card will allow Windows Vista and Windows 7 32-bit *and* 64-bit OS's to fully utilize the storage capacity of the drive.  Win XP and other pre Windows Vista OS's are out of luck.

The other caveats of this drive as I've posted above still exist.  This was a great move by WD to help foster the inevitable move to GPT and EFI. 

As a postscript, these drives have tested max spin rates of 6000 RPM.  This isn't 7200 RPM but is still better than the older "green" drives running at 5400 RPM.