Downgrading WD Black to Green

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Avlor
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2011 4:53 am

Downgrading WD Black to Green

Post by Avlor » Tue Sep 13, 2011 8:56 am

Hey All,

I was recently shopping for another hard drive for my home server, which already has 2xWD Green in it. While browsing eBay a weird thing surfaced: WD Elements 2TB was somehow 15% cheaper than the Green drive, so I went for it. I thought I would smart out everybody and pry the Elements open to get the drive and keep the enclosure as well, betting that WD would outfit their low end enclosure with "low end" drive which is perfect for my needs. But nah, the drive in there turned out to be WD Black, which is of course totally unexpected!
Hence the question is, is there a way to make a Black drive behave like Green? From the reviews I've read, the difference in noise and power consumption is pretty dramatic. Is there a management tool for WD drives that I missed that would slow it down, enable IntelliPark and somehow allow reduced power draw? Or (a remote possibility) will a PCB swap from WD Green work? If not, is the noise level difference that noticeable?
Thanks in advance!

faugusztin
Posts: 450
Joined: Mon Mar 29, 2010 2:47 am
Location: Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Re: Downgrading WD Black to Green

Post by faugusztin » Wed Sep 14, 2011 2:18 am

No, you cannot make a 5400RPM drive from 7200RPM drive. Best you can do is enable AAM and hope it won't be noisy. Or sell it and get greens :).

dhanson865
Posts: 2198
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 11:20 am
Location: TN, USA

Re: Downgrading WD Black to Green

Post by dhanson865 » Wed Sep 14, 2011 7:16 pm

Yep, find your nearest gamer and sell it to him and buy a low power drive. Not even worth trying to change anything about the black.

Avlor
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2011 4:53 am

Re: Downgrading WD Black to Green

Post by Avlor » Thu Sep 15, 2011 1:05 pm

Yeah, I guess that's what I'll do. Given the prices on eBay, I might actually profit from the whole affair =)

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