WD Green 1.5TB vs. Seagate 7200.12 500GB

Post by **MikeC** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 9:17 am

MiKeLezZ · Post by **MiKeLezZ** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 1:23 pm

Do exist different models of WD15EADS? Like a 3-platters and a 4-platters ones?
If so, how can I tell the difference?

tkorsvold · Post by **tkorsvold** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 1:26 pm

How silent is the drive when compared to the Sansung EcoGreen F2 500GB?

T

sampo · Post by **sampo** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 2:32 pm

WD is a better choice for quiet computing. Samsung is relatively quiet only in idle mode. Both drives benefit from Scythe or similar HDD enclosure.

bbzidane · Post by **bbzidane** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 5:41 pm

nice article
it would have been nice though to list the green drive for 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB

i got a good deal on a 2TB green wd drive (~140USD), but looking at the noise/power consumption, i think im going to buy a 1.5TB drive

currently running 1TB and 1.5TB, was thinking of swapping them out for 2x2TB. guess it will be 2x1.5TB now.

thanks for the review.

sNNooPY · Post by **sNNooPY** » Wed Dec 09, 2009 11:43 pm

I recently bought WD 1.5 Green. It's amazing. I keep it inside this thing:
http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/produc ... ectID=5152

It's cool & quiet.

Belmonte · Post by **Belmonte** » Thu Dec 10, 2009 6:06 am

There are new drives with 64MB cache. The model numbers end in EARS instead of EADS.

Does anybody know if there's some change in noise?

fyleow · Post by **fyleow** » Thu Dec 10, 2009 8:10 am

I am very surprised by those random access times. I was expecting the Green drive to fall behind significantly due to the slower speed, but it's faster in one test AND it is quieter.

hybrid2d4x4 · Post by **hybrid2d4x4** » Thu Dec 10, 2009 1:00 pm

I was surprised too. My 1.5TB Green feels brutally slow/unresponsive at times, which I assumed was slow random access, but maybe it's the head un-parking. Very good storage drive but doesn't feel anywhere near as "snappy" as my 640GB 2-platter Blue as an OS/App drive.

bradc · Post by **bradc** » Thu Dec 10, 2009 2:59 pm

There is a bug in hdtach which only reads over the first 1TB of a Hard Drive for random access times. If you look at the graph it clearly stops at the 1TB mark.

Witness:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=77 ... pert&pid=5

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Thu Dec 10, 2009 8:34 pm

Belmonte wrote:There are new drives with 64MB cache. The model numbers end in EARS instead of EADS.

Does anybody know if there's some change in noise?

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/S ... 701229.pdf

Same noise specs, no power savings in idle. So it fixes the head parking by not going idle.

Sounds like Samsung and Seagate get a bump on this years low power drives. Maybe WDC can make it up to us by coming out with a better SSD.

fyleow · Post by **fyleow** » Fri Dec 11, 2009 11:24 am

bradc wrote:There is a bug in hdtach which only reads over the first 1TB of a Hard Drive for random access times. If you look at the graph it clearly stops at the 1TB mark.

Witness:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=77 ... pert&pid=5

Haha that makes a lot of sense then. It's like the WD is getting a free short stroke performance boost in the benchmark.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Fri Dec 11, 2009 3:08 pm

dhanson865 wrote:
Belmonte wrote:There are new drives with 64MB cache. The model numbers end in EARS instead of EADS.

Does anybody know if there's some change in noise?
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/S ... 701229.pdf

Same noise specs, no power savings in idle. So it fixes the head parking by not going idle.

Sounds like Samsung and Seagate get a bump on this years low power drives. Maybe WDC can make it up to us by coming out with a better SSD.

New info from Tech Report. Apparently you get 10% higher capacity on the EARS than you do on the older drives.

For quite some time now, mechanical hard drives have stored data in 512-byte chunks called sectors. That sector size worked for lower capacity points, but as areal densities rise, it's become increasingly inappropriate for new drives. As a result, the industry has decided to transition to a 4KB sector size dubbed Advanced Format.

So-called legacy formatting schemes sandwich each 512-byte sector between Sync/DAM and ECC blocks that handle data address marking and error correction, respectivelyâ€”and also take up space. You still need those blocks with Advanced Format, but only every 4KB rather than every 512 bytes, which translates to a dramatic reduction in overhead. This approach allows Advanced Format to make more efficient use of a platter's available capacity, and Western Digital expects it to boost useful storage by 7-11%, depending on the implementation. Current 500GB/platter products stand to see an increase in useful capacity of about 10%, which is really quite impressive.

Advanced Format's reduction in overhead. Source: Western Digital.

Since not all operating systems can handle 4KB sectors natively, Western Digital's Adavanced Format implementation divides each 4KB physical sector into eight 512-byte logical sectors. The drive's firmware performs all the necessary translations, and according to Western Digital, there's no loss in performance as long as partitions are properly aligned. Windows 7 and Vista should align new partitions properly on their own, but you'll have to download a free WD Align application to align partitions correctly with Windows XP. WD Align is also necessary if you're using a disk cloning utility to create partitions under Vista or Win7.

Although Western Digital's Advanced Format implementation uses the drive's firmware to translate requests, users won't be able to add the feature to existing drives with a firmware upgrade. The drive's platters must be prepared for Advanced Format at the factory.

Western Digital is first rolling out Advanced Format in its Caviar Green line. 500GB drives featuring the new formatting scheme are scheduled to start shipping this week and should be followed quickly by higher capacity points. You'll be able to identify an Advanced-Format-compatible drive by its model number, WD10EARS, or by stickers on the drive and its packaging. These new models will also feature larger 64MB caches (previous Greens topped out at 32MB), although Western Digital doesn't expect their street prices to be any higher.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Fri Dec 11, 2009 10:28 pm

Thanks for the review. I might grab one for my storage drive.

Does anyone have any experience with the 1 TB WD10EADS? Being in the same family I'd assume it's very similar, but if someone could chime in that'd be great. It has slightly worse price/TB than the 1.5 TB reviewed, but I'm not convinced I need quite that much space. I'm only now filling up my 500 GB WD5000AAKS.

Compddd · Post by **Compddd** » Mon Dec 14, 2009 1:58 pm

on Amazon

$109.99 for the WD15EADS
$149.99 for the WD15EARS

:/ So much for the street price not being any higher!

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Wed Dec 16, 2009 8:06 pm

Compddd wrote:on Amazon

$109.99 for the WD15EADS
$149.99 for the WD15EARS

:/ So much for the street price not being any higher!

That's not a good comparison.

WD15EADS no tax and free shipping $109.99
WD15EARS not in stock

Prices are always out of whack when there is a shortage of product. Get back to me on the price difference of these on March 15th 2010 or June 1st 2010 and then we'll have something to talk about.

_MarcoM_ · Post by **_MarcoM_** » Thu Dec 17, 2009 12:20 pm

I'm curious about performance of 1TB EARS 64MB cache model, 2 platter@500GB. Maybe more cache is only marketing, but what about this new advanced format in the performance department?

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 5:27 pm

_MarcoM_ wrote:I'm curious about performance of 1TB EARS 64MB cache model, 2 platter@500GB. Maybe more cache is only marketing, but what about this new advanced format in the performance department?

No change if you format it correctly and slower if you don't.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... i=3691&p=2

If you use XP, 2000, or 2003 you wan't to avoid these drives until you go Win 7 or Server 2008 or Linux.

You also have to be careful when using Acronis/Ghost/etc.

discopig · Post by **discopig** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 5:47 pm

dhanson - you beat me to that link...

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

If you read page 1, I think the more interesting thing is the decreased error rates.

ECC burst error correction stands to improve by 50%, and the overall error rate capability improves by 2 orders of magnitude. In theory these reliability benefits should immediately apply to all 4K sector drives (making the Advanced Format drives more reliable than regular drives), but Western Digital is not pushing that idea at this time.

Might be useful for larger RAID arrays.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Fri Dec 18, 2009 7:56 pm

discopig wrote:If you read page 1, I think the more interesting thing is the decreased error rates.

ECC burst error correction stands to improve by 50%, and the overall error rate capability improves by 2 orders of magnitude. In theory these reliability benefits should immediately apply to all 4K sector drives (making the Advanced Format drives more reliable than regular drives), but Western Digital is not pushing that idea at this time.
Might be useful for larger RAID arrays.

More like more necessary. RAID 5 is already unreasonable with modern drives and has been for years. RAID 6 will become unreasonable if capacity keeps growing (and with 4K sectors that is a reasonable bet).

It'll make that 1, 0+1, or 1+0 raid a little more reliable but I think it will be lost in the noise when using 0, 5, or 6.

_MarcoM_ · Post by **_MarcoM_** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 1:26 am

So, if i want a 7200.12 in my P150, suspensions are not enough to quiet it? Any possessor of this drive in Antec P150/Solo here? What do I need to keep it quiet?

allenlux · Post by **allenlux** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:08 pm

I'm not sure if I am supposed to revive an old thread with some information which is slightly off-topic, but as this thread is one of the few places with discussion of the WD Advanced Format drives, I'll mention my recent experience with one of these drives.

I needed a new drive to replace an existing drive (in a Windows XP system) which showed signs of possible incipient failure. My local PC parts shop in Luxembourg sold me a WD10EARS 1.0 TB drive (they had no other 1 TB drives in stock). I had not heard of these Advanced Format drives before, but there was a special sticker on the packing to eplain that special precautions were needed. The drive was manufactured on 6 December 2009 and cost 95 euros.

I wanted to copy 4 partitions across from the old drive, with a total of about 185 GB of data. In the past I have set up new drives with Acronis Disk Director (I have DD 9) but this did not work, giving a "drive not found" error. I bought myself a copy of Paragon Partition Manager 10 and this worked fine. After copying the partitions and their contents, but before putting the disk into use, I ran the WD Align System Utility.

This took around 8 hours to run over the 4 partitions, with the run-time per partition being proportionate to the amount of data in each partition. This is on a Core 2 Duo system running at 2.13 GHz on a Via PT880 Pro chipset.

The new drive is now running. A quick check with HD Tach gave:
CPU utilisation 2%
Random access 15.6ms
Average read 89.6 MB/sec
Burst 128.8

There doesn't seem any reason to be concerned about buying these drives for an XP system, but I was surprised at how long it took for the alignment operation. However, this only needs to be done once.

BeerParty · Post by **BeerParty** » Tue Jan 19, 2010 12:02 pm

Just my $0.02...

I just picked up a Seagate 7200.12 500GB drive, and the drive is very quite and very fast. I can't say silent, as the system is in my kitchen and thus a noisy environment, but it is hard mounted in a case on my desk and I can not hear it while seated at the desk (~0.5 meter distance), even while seeking.

MtnHermit · Post by **MtnHermit** » Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:25 am

According to the WD Align Webpage I have two options to format a 1.5TB HDD within WinXP. The CD iso is 3x faster than the WinXP command line solution. Are we talking min, hours, days, what?

I have an i3-530 if that matters.

Thanks for the review.

allenlux · Post by **allenlux** » Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:16 pm

See my post above. I used the WD Align System Utility (from Paragon), which I think is what you mean by the Windows XP command line utility.

MtnHermit · Post by **MtnHermit** » Wed Feb 24, 2010 5:02 pm

allenlux wrote:See my post above. I used the WD Align System Utility (from Paragon), which I think is what you mean by the Windows XP command line utility.

Exactly what I needed, based on your experience with a 1TB drive, a 1.5TB should be 50% longer and therefore 12-hours, half-a-day. Yikes

I now know it is worth the effort to go the CD iso route to cut that down to ONLY 4-hours. Like you said, only once.

Thanks for the post.

allenlux · Post by **allenlux** » Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:25 pm

Actually my understanding is that it's proportional to the amount of data on the drive, not the size of the drive. My 8 hours was for only 185 GB of data.

But an empty drive should be very fast.

I could be wrong about this - when I bought my drive there was very little information around on this subject, and having re-aligned my drive I have not given any more attention t the subject.

leg · Post by **leg** » Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:58 pm

It's much faster to run WD Align on an empty drive.
I partitioned my WD15EARS and right after that ran WD Align (windows version) and it took about 10 minutes to finish.

MtnHermit · Post by **MtnHermit** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 9:16 am

leg wrote:It's much faster to run WD Align on an empty drive.
I partitioned my WD15EARS and right after that ran WD Align (windows version) and it took about 10 minutes to finish.

Did you use WinXP?

leg · Post by **leg** » Fri Mar 05, 2010 5:04 am

Yes, I'm with WIN XP 64bit SP2

And sorry for the late reply!

WD Green 1.5TB vs. Seagate 7200.12 500GB

WD Green 1.5TB vs. Seagate 7200.12 500GB

Formatting Time?