Continuing to test the new WHS box, I was treated to yet another new Western Digital Green failure this week. Ridiculous!
Of the 15 Seagate 7200.11’s that I purchased November 2008 to February 2009, two also failed. One I ascribed to Newegg’s poor packaging at the time. The second was a clear firmware failure.
The remaining six 1.5TB WD Greens are currently doing a build/ verify of three raid 6 arrays at the moment. After this week, it does look like running WHS in Hyper-V is the path I will take, so that’s good. I’m just waiting to see if I can kill off anymore WD Greens at this point before doing the final installation.
Bottom line: I’m not overly happy with the WD Green drives, to the point that I just bought two more Hitachi 2TB drives and a 1TB drive (just for a spare) today. With WD’s TLER, and their frankly crazy pricing on RE drives (it is getting to the point where you can run 2x Hitachis in Raid 1 for the price of a RE drive of the same capacity), I won’t be purchasing any more from them in the near future.
Greens are not good for raid. They all spin at different speeds, so they tend to break during raid.
The WD greens are on the supported drive list for Adaptec’s if you use a jumper and set them to 1.5gbps. Still, at this point with 3/8 dying in two weeks, I won’t trust data to them.
Sounds like a bad batch to me (not a great help, I know). Personally i have 23 WD Greens and have never had a failure on them. Will one fail? Of course. Will I get a DOA or early death on a drive I buy going forward? Yup.
Personally I buy all WD Greens for my WHS but if buying multiple drives buy then singly from several suppliers to try and avoid batch related issues.
Yea the 8 have been fine since. I actually picked up two more WD EARS 2TB Greens which have worked fine. Personally I think it was a shipping issue at this point.
I purchased 12 WD Green HDD for my media centre, 4 Died in under 1 week LOL! I rang WD and the techie on the phone admitted that the Green drives have like 60% failure rate. Now I have to arrange shipping to Singapore for replacement at my cost.
Never EVER again will I purchase WD drives.
I had 5 1.5TB WD Green drives at the beginning of 2010 and setup a software raid 5 (mdadm) on CentOS using a LSI 3081E-R. All 5 failed within 3 months even after I took them out of a raid 5 array after the first 2 died.
The drives were bought in two different batchs around 6 months apart. All were RMA’d by WD and sold off to be replaced with WD Blacks which have been fine in a stripped setup on a M1015 (9211 flash) although I have not tried them in raid 5.
The data is mainly my movie and music collection and so if recoverable, all-be-it with quite a lot of time, so no biggie. All important data was sync’d to a USB drive nightly.
I also have two 2TB WD greens which are spanned via WHS 2011 software raid as a backup set to the 4xWD Black 1TB drives and have never exhibited an issue.
I tend to recommend SAS, RE4, Blacks, forget it in that order to my clients. Greens are fine for archiving though in my experience.
The only plus point is that the WD RMA process was pretty easy and took about 1 week but then I am currently living in Singapore :-).