Opinion on Western Digital Green Power drives?

[mchank]

Does anyone have any experience with these:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=388

I'm considering purchasing one to use as a Time Machine drive, as its lower power/low heat seem ideal, but I've heard a lot of bad comments about Western Digital quality/low reliability, especially about their MyBook series. Would this drive or a Seagate Drive be better?

 

[pprior]

I'm using one as my main boot drive. No complaints. Of course reliability assessment based on anecdotal replies is worthless.

The best place to discuss hard drives is www.storagereview.com IMO - check there as they have a ton of stats on HD choices.

I went with this drive for noise and heat reasons - it's not the fastest but it works well and I'm all about the quiet computer experience.

 

[bananaquit]

The heat and noise argument appears reasonable. I have only seen reviews of the 1TB unit, and I'm wondering if we can guess that the WD 500 GP will have similar advantages? That's assuming the drives really can make a collective difference, and that they really do deserve a "green" marketing tag.

 

[prostuff1]

If you take a look at SPCR's review on hard drives you will see that they really liked the WD GP drives. The only fault i have heard about them is that they do not work well in a raid array as the "controller" on the drive can mess with spindle speed at will and that screws with the array in a way that it does not like.

 

[therealmacdaddy]

Green Power all the way.

I just spent all day figuring out why the green power drives would not work in a Xeon based XServe. (Very slow to appear, if at all, in disk utility).
Popped them in a G5 tower and they came right up and formatted, but even formatted they took forever to appear in disk utility on the Xserve, then they would not boot after erase and install of XServe software from the Xserve.

Working in the G5 really through me off the track, there seems to be a difference on what WD considers Enterprise Storage and Workstation Storage settings. Some drives ship with SSC enabled with no jumper, others need jumper for SSC enable.

Once I added the (SSC jumper) between pins one and two the drives appeared on the Xserve and I am now loading software. Will keep you posted.

Drive Model 500gb WD5000CSRTL

 

[haze]

I am using two 1GB versions in an external FW RAID1 enclosure. Liking them so far. Newegg gas them rated very highly. WD internal drives have a good reputation even if the MyBook doesn't.

 

[xraydoc]

I've got a 1TB version in my Mac Pro as a Time Machine drive. Works great. Quiet, reasonably cool and fast enough.

 

[gwerhart0800]

Ditto ... Green is good

I have a 1T drive in an external enclosure. I also have a Seagate 750GB drive in a different enclosure. The WD drive runs cooler and quieter than the Seagate. A coworker also has one of the 1T WD green drives and likes it also. If I buy another drive, it will probably be another WD green.