Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS

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Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS

WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40%
A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings
IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
2TB capacity holds up to 400,000 digital photos, 500,000 MP3 files, and 240 hours of HD video.
3 year limited warranty.

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.

Rating: (out of 29 reviews)

List Price: $ 159.99

Price: $ 110.00

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5 Responses to “Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS”

SCF Says:
June 25th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Review by SCF for Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
Rating:
I’m a software engineer and I have enormous archives of data. I currently have more than fifty drives on the shelf behind me, totaling about 20 terabytes of data.

For the last two years, I’ve used almost exclusively the Western Digital Green drives. Perhaps a half dozen each of the 750gb, 1tb, 1.5tb drives. They’ve been fantastic for data storage.

When the 2tb version reached the right price point, I ordered a couple of those. I was aware of the issues with sector size, detection, and formatting in Windows, but I use Solaris, Linux, and OSX almost exclusively. These drives were being used in OSX, which does have support for these drives.

However, when I plugged both drives in, I had a hell of a time formatting them through the Disk Utility and had to do it manually on the command line.

The real problems began after the drives were formatted and I had moved a ton of data to them. On one of the drives, I renamed a folder which contained about 1.25tb of data. Instantly, the folder disappeared and the drive appeared empty. That’s right. I renamed the folder all my data was in and that magically deleted all my content.

Upon closer inspection, the data was still there – it just didn’t appear in the file system. Thankfully, I was able to recover the data with some command-line-fu. I then reformatted the drive and gave it a torture test until the time I had to get these back in the box to return to Amazon before the refund period expired. I found boh of the drives to be questionable, but the one drive above to be particularly bad. It could have been just a bad drive or it could be a consistent problem across all of the 2tb WD Greens. My test sample (two drives) isn’t adequate to extrapolate.

I will say that the experience was enough to drive me away from the 2tb version. I’ve instead gone back to buying the 1.5tb WD Greens and replaced both 2tb drives with three of those.

I don’t believe the EARS vs EADS version has anything to do with it as I’ve been using the 1.5tb versions for a long time now and that includes both EARS and EADS drives. They have been stable and I have never had any issues with them.

I’ve had good experiences until recently with Western Digital’s drives, but I’m too gun-shy from the latest experience to try their 2tb drives again any time soon. Back to the trusty 1.5tbs.
J. Vaughn Says:
June 25th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Review by J. Vaughn for Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
Rating:
I’ve bought six of these. They are quiet. After many hours, they are barely warm to the touch. Every other hard-disk drive made can be used as a space heater.

They are a bit slower, adding about 33% to the seek time, but nothing noticeable to data reads. This only matters when reading lots of small files like during boot-up. I use an Intel SSD for my main drive and one of these for data. It is the best of both worlds.

I’ve found that most computers recognize these drives but must be told to mount them, format them, and assign them a drive letter. (This only needs to be done once.) This is a problem with large drives, not with these specifically. For true ease of setup, get a 1TB drive.
Michael D. Newcomer Says:
June 25th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Review by Michael D. Newcomer for Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
Rating:
I bought this drive for the 4th bay on my Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array DR04DD10 which is attached to a 24″ iMac. I have the other three bays filled with Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EADS and have had them about a year and they’ve worked perfectly. They run very cool and quiet (you have to put your ear right against Drobo to hear them) resulting in Drobo’s fan hardly ever having to kick on. The fan on Drobo is louder than the drives.

Note to Drobo Owners: You will need to update your firmware for Drobo to version 1.3.6 if you haven’t already. The new update supports the new 4kb sectors (advanced format). And you must update Drobo dashboard FIRST to version 1.6.8 before updating the firmware.

I am a photographer shooting with and Canon EOS 5D Mark II which creates giant files right out of the camera (20-25MB each), so the space is nice. Since I am using it primarily for storage, speed isn’t a big concern. People who really need speed should check out Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD2001FASS but it comes at a much higher price point.

The packaging was excellent. A large outer box, and inside was a smaller box surrounded by air pillows. Opening the smaller box you find the drive suspended by two feet cushions. All 4 of the drives I’ve ordered from Amazon have come this way and I really appreciate it Maybe I’m just lucky. It’s too early to tell how long the drive will last. Having a 3 year warranty from Western Digital help with peace of mind. Once it’s time to expand Drobo again, I’ll will be buying another Caviar Green but by then we’ll be up to 4TB drives.
Yachtsman Says:
June 26th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Review by Yachtsman for Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
Rating:
Using a startech external usb drive bay the disk worked straight from the box. With OSx you will be asked to initialize the disk, after replying yes disk utility is automatically started, select the number of partitions and names that you want and about 2 minutes later the disk is available for use. The disk is clearly much faster than USB 2 and seems to run about 5c cooler than a WD 500gb disk that I also have in the external bay.

Much to early to comment on reliability yet but these oem drives are usually fairly well sorted out.
S. Fischer Says:
June 26th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Review by S. Fischer for Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
Rating:

I was impressed all the way around with this purchase:

1. Price – Unbeatable from Amazon with free shipping.

2. Shipping – Was worried about buying an OEM drive because of all the past horror stories about shipping, but they sent it double-boxed with way more than enough support around the drive. I ran a SMART check just to be sure and there were zero problems.

3. Installation – I configured the drive in Windows 7 (Administrative Tools) without any problems. The drive formats to 1.81 TB, but I think you actually pick up an extra 50 GB somewhere along the line.

4. Speed – I then encrypted the drive with TrueCrypt and filled it to the brim in about 5-6 hours, so the speed isn’t all that slow. It averaged about 92 MB/s (103 MB/s high to 82 MB/s low). The other thing you have to remember is the transfer speed can only go as fast as your slowest drive…meaning if you have a slower drive than this one, you will see a slower transfer speed than what this drive is rated for. Keep that in mind when you hear people complaining about the speed.

5. Reliability – (yet to be proven) I have owned several Caviar Black drives in the past for many years and none of them ever failed on me. This is the first Green one I have owned, and so far I’m impressed.

- All in all, I would recommend this drive to anyone looking for a large storage device.