Backblaze posts failure rates

[smitbret]

Don't buy WD Green 1-2TB, they have failure rates over 120% (i.e. the replacements even fail).

That said, I already knew that since I have had 5 failures across the 3 WD Green 2TB drives I own... And this is why WD cut the warranty period on the drives from the original 5 years to 3 years (or 2 if OEM).

Broad, encompassing statements like this are silly.

120%?

My failure rates have been 0%

I've got a 1TB Green from April 2009 that is the OS and temp disk for my server.
Also got a 2TB Green from March 2011 that is the parity disk for my FlexRAID setup.

Never had a bit of trouble from either.

I just like to refute silly comments. Everything mechanical or electrical has a 100% failure rate. Eventually they will all die. Sorry if there is something environmental that is causing your failures but YMMV.

 

[Fallen Kell]

It is just the 1 and 2 TB that I have had problems with. I have had the 3TB Greens working fine in the same enclosure. It isn't environmental, just bad drives (specifically the EARS model).

 

[pauldun170]

It is just the 1 and 2 TB that I have had problems with. I have had the 3TB Greens working fine in the same enclosure. It isn't environmental, just bad drives (specifically the EARS model).

That's good to hear since I'm considering a 3tb MyBook external.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Heh, come to think of it I have had really good luck with hard drives in the last 10 or so years. The only hard drive that died on me in that time period was Hitachi IDE 250GB. RMA'ed it and replacement is still humming away perfectly. Every drive I have purchased since then, and I have purchased a lot of them, has been fine. Anecdotal evidence, I have been running ten 1TB WD10EACS 00D6B0 drives for about 3-4 years in my fileserver with zero failures and zero reallocated sectors. Eight of those drives were in RAID5 and I have had zero drop outs. The only reason I'm selling them right now is because I upgraded to higher capacity drives and these have to go. However, I'm confident had I not dismantled the rig those drives would have been running fine for years to come.

 

[Zxian]

RTFA

There's no mention of Western Digital drives having a 120% failure rate. People see "green" and immediately associate that with WD, when the really terrible drive that got 120% is a Seagate.

Western Digital Green (WD10EADS)         3.6%
Western Digital Green (WD10EACS)	  n/a
Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003)  120.0%

You read your own article before chewing people out.

 

[Doomer]

Lmao lol

 

[Red Squirrel]

The issue with green drives is the head parking / sleep mode though. This is very very very bad in raid setups. When a raid system sees a drive vanish, what do you think happens.

I tried to do a raid 5 with 4x 2TB green drives once. Worse idea ever. Ended up having to make a crone job to read/write a small data file every 30 seconds.

 

[Whiznot]

I just bought a 2TB WD Green WD20EZRX after which I became concerned about reliability and the LCC and the 8 second head parking. Before initializing and formatting I used WDIDLE3 to set the parking time to 300 seconds. So far there have been no problems and the drive is very quiet though is runs 3 degrees warmer than my old Samsung Spinpoints.

 

[Elixer]

Funny enough, I have a lightly used hitachi 1TB 7.2K HD that all of the sudden, had incredibly slow read speeds.
SMART shows all is fine, but, it would take >2 hours to open one program on that drive.
Replaced the drive with a WD black, and all is well, but, this is the first HD I ever had that has degraded with under 1000 hours on it, though, it is about 4 years old.

 

[Zxian]

The issue with green drives is the head parking / sleep mode though. This is very very very bad in raid setups. When a raid system sees a drive vanish, what do you think happens.

I tried to do a raid 5 with 4x 2TB green drives once. Worse idea ever. Ended up having to make a crone job to read/write a small data file every 30 seconds.

Depends on the RAID controller (or software equivalent). I had two different revisions of Green drives connected to my 3ware controller without any major issues. The only change I made was to enable staggered spinup and enable TLER (older drives let you do this) but I didn't have any issues with sleep or head parking.

It's unfair to say that Green drives and RAID always cause problems - better to say YMMV/use at your own risk.