Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EARS

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Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EARS

WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature.
IntelliPower – A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
1 TB capacity holds up to 200,000 digital photos, 250,000 MP3 files, and 120 hours of HD video.
3 year limited warranty.

Product Description
WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. Available in capacities up to 2 TB, WD Caviar® Green™ SATA hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. Based on WD’s exclusive GreenPower™ technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute. As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. They are ideal for PCs, external storage and other devices that require lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation.

Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EARS

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5 Responses to “Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EARS”

snapcrackle Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 4:36 am
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD10EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital’s popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It’s a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it’s the right drive for you.

The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters – so a 1TB drive has just two platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available – and has 64MB of cache.

ADVANCED FORMAT: There’s another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.

ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.

The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install – then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their “Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility” web page – anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.

So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say “WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7.” This drive might not a good choice for some XP users – you’ll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.

VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, “Western Digital’s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins.” They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.

LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.

OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom’s Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled “Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB,” with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google “Pros And Cons Of Going Green.”
Rating: 5 / 5
snapcrackle Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 5:04 am
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD15EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital’s popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It’s a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it’s the right drive for you.

The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters – so a 1.5TB drive has just three platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available – and has 64MB of cache.

ADVANCED FORMAT: There’s another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.

ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.

The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install – then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their “Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility” web page – anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.

So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say “WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7.” This drive might not a good choice for some XP users – you’ll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.

VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, “Western Digital’s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins.” They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.

LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.

OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom’s Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled “Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB,” with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google “Pros And Cons Of Going Green.”
Rating: 5 / 5
Berzerker Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 5:50 am
INFORMATION ONLY! I don’t own this drive; however I did just purchase the previous Caviar Green 1.5 TB WD15EADS model.

As I was about to purchase that hard drive, I noticed the banner near the top of the page that informs you “There is a newer model of this item”

I thought, “Well, that’s awesome. Thanks Amazon!” It was in my shopping cart, but then, I decided to do some research first, just to see if it was worth a little extra money. After all, the debates about cache size (32MB to 64MB) seem to reveal it’s just a marketing gimmick and performance gains don’t really exist.

So, after some searching, I came to learn about the new Western Digital “Advanced Format”.

It seems these new Caviar Green drives (all containing EARS in the model number) are using 4k sectors rather than the standard 512b (0.5k) sectors.

This change means that these drives are NOT inherently compatible with Windows XP or earlier.

However, Western Digital has two solutions in place to allow them to work with Windows XP.

1) They include a jumper on the drive that can be set to “trick” Windows into properly aligning the partition table.

This solution is only “reliable” when using a SINGLE partition. I don’t like it.

2) They have a custom application (not pretty) that can be used to “shift” the partition and data into alignment.

This is apparently the recommended method that can also work for multiple partitions.

Clearly, you don’t see this information described anywhere on this page and since Windows XP is still in wide-spread use, I think it’s unfair not to be given this warning upfront. Also, if you use any type of hard drive imaging software, these new drives will be problematic there as well.

This information and more can be read in the article at AnandTech:

[...]

Anyway, I scored this at a neutral three stars based on lack of important information only.

And, while I love the feature, Amazon’s “new version” notice can be misleading given the vast difference between the two models.
Rating: 3 / 5
snapcrackle Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 6:02 am
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD20EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital’s popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It’s a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it’s the right drive for you.

The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters – so a 2TB drive has just four platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available – and has 64MB of cache.

ADVANCED FORMAT: There’s another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512MB sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512MB logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides a 7-11% increase in formatted disk space, and improvement in burst speeds.

ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.

The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install – then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their “Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility” web page – anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.

So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say “WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7.” This drive might not a good choice for some XP users – you’ll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.

VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, “Western Digital’s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins.” They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.

LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.

OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom’s Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled “Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB,” with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google “Pros And Cons Of Going Green.”
Rating: 5 / 5
Schwartz Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 7:37 am
I purchased this drive to replace the drive in my Wife’s computer that was running out of space. The PC was running Windows 7 and the drive being replaced was a WD3200KS 7200RPM drive.

PC the drive went into: Stock Intel Q6600, Gigabyte GA-EP45-D3SL, 8GB DDR2, and a ATI HD4870.

The Windows install wasn’t that old and I didn’t really want to mess with getting her all her stuff back so I used a Clonezilla Live CD to clone the old drive to the new one. I then booted straight into Windows 7 off the new drive. Windows asked me to restart so I did and the system was up and running without incident. I then went into the Windows 7 disk manager and extended the partition to fill the whole drive.

Knowing this was an Advanced Format drive but unsure if the alignment would be correct due to the cloning, I downloaded the bootable image for the align utility from the Western Digital site and burned it to a CD. I ran the utility and it indicated that the partition was aligned correctly and there was nothing that needed to be done.

The old drive showed as a 5.4 and the new one as a 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I didn’t think that was too bad coming from an older 7200 RPM drive to this. I was a little worried it would be slower but that isn’t the case. I haven’t personally used the PC enough myself to know but my wife says she notices it is a bit faster and things are quicker to load.

This drive for me was a worthwhile upgrade and money well spent to this point. Only time will tell about the reliability as with any drive.
Rating: 5 / 5