Western Digital Green 2TB SATA3 6GB/S Intellipower 64MB Cache 3.5in Internal Hard Drive HDD Price: $107.69 CAD Toshiba HDKPC09 2TB SATA3 7200RPM 32MB Cache 3.5in Internal Hard Disk Drive HDD Price: $104.98 CAD

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http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=77934
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=77085

They're each on sale for $90. I am looking to buy three units.

I hear the Toshiba drives are actually Hitachi, which I believe are very good.

I'll be using them mostly for data storage, one for internal, and the two will go into my Drobo.

The WD Green is slower at 5400, but has double the cache, 64MB. On the other hand, the Toshiba is 7200RPM, but only has 32MB cache.

What do you guys suggest? I realize the WD green's are two per customers only.

Is getting 2x Green's and 1x Toshiba better, or should I just get 3x Toshiba or Green?

Stay away from Greens, I've had 1 DOA and 1 die in a couple weeks. Only 1 of them still works.  

This message was modified by the poster at 01 29, 2013 06:53 PM

I have five 2TB Greens from 1 to 3 years old, all are fine. I also have friends with them, none have died.

I've never understood how people get so many dead ones unless they are using them in enclosures and banging them around while in use

Which exact model?

The only green I have had die, was because it had a molex-sata adapter plugged in wrong (I was kind of intoxicated, and forced the molex in backwards)

WD Still replaced it, I did not even have to pay for postage.

I just ordered 2x Toshiba's to go into my Drobo. I think this is the best, since the Drobo already has two other Hitachi Deskstar 7200rpm's. Should be best if the other two drives are also 7200RPM.

The WD Green is my third drive, which will be used in my desktop as a backup/music drive. Should be ok, even when it spins down automatically after a few minutes.... Although, is there a way to prevent this?

Bought a WD green bad sectors after first day....my sample size is small 2 to be exact.

Id avoid the greens. Not as bad as some people but my track record isnt great. 3/5 greens are dead (all from ears series though). Mostly id avoid them as the aggressive head parking is annoying as hell.

I should mention that NONE of my five greens park heads, all are always ready to go without delay.

You guys are changing your power settings in Windows so that the drives never spin down right?

Delete Image. Please use this feature thoughtfully.  Report this image 

For Windows 7:

Control Panel (Make sure its in View by Small Icons) > Power Options > Beside whatever plan you have selected click "Change Plan Settings" > Click "Change advanced power settings" > Expand "Hard Disk" > Set it to 0 or never (Note: Laptops will have 2 settings here, one will be for when on battery power, set this to something higher like 30 mins).

The above screenshot is for my work laptop (which has an SSD, so this doesn't really matter) and my computer from home over Teamviewer to compare them.

The greens I had would park themselves after a short period of time of inactivity regardless of the settings in windows (this is partially what makes them "green"). The only true way to fix the excessive parking is to use WDIDLE.

Newer drives do seem better -- At least the RMA 3TB drive I got back for a 2TB one "seems" fine. I guess 1 of 5 ain't a bad record   :lol:

This message was modified by the poster at 01 30, 2013 09:10 AM

Just my personal experience here:

I have seven different WD drives from the past 4 years. 2 are 1TBs. All, including my Raptors are very good drives. The Raptors failed once each, after 4 years, and were RMA'd for replacement drives with no hassle. No problems with the 1TB versions either.

Toshiba drives, while I haven't owned a 3.5inch desktop Toshiba drive, I have replaced countless (15-20) 2.5inch drives. Drive quality on the Toshibas were what I call "almost worthless" because they failed in ways that allowed for %0 data recovery (unless shipping to a data recovery firm). Unlike the WD's which always seem to give errors first, allows you to get your data off, then fails shortly thereafter.

I have 16 Green drives. The oldest are about five or six years old; the newest are from 2009 or 2010, I can't remember for sure. All have been in continuous use since purchase. None have given me any issues at all. WD Green's are actually the only HDD produce line that has never failed on me so far.

I have six 2tb WD Green drives in my Unraid array. Not one problem preclearing and no failures yet. I also have used 2tb greens for a couple external drives with no problems as well. I only have 2 "EZRX" drives but they precleared significantly faster than the older versions.

I did have a 640Gb Caviar Black die on me last week though. Thank god for unraid.

The Toshiba drive (Hitachi 7k3000) is 64 MB cache. I gave NCIX a lot of evidence for this, but apparently they are unwilling to update  their site, since the latest weekend sale ad still says 32 MB for the 3TB model. Both the 2TB and 3TB models are 64 MB cache. Toshiba AND Hitachi's site confirm this.
http://forums.ncix.com/forums/?mode=showthread&msg_id=2560378&threadid=2560378&forum=103&product_id=77086&msgcount=13&overclockid=0#msg2560378


The Toshiba drive is 7200 rpm, 64 MB cache, and does not head park. The Green WILL head park and is 5400 rpm. Only the very early greens could have head parking disabled with WDIDLE. If these are going in an array in an NAS, you should get the Reds, which won't drop  out of the array like the Greens are wont to do due to no TLER. Toshiba drive obviously doesn't have this issue, but use more power. The Toshiba drive has all-around better performance, but for a storage drive, you'll probably never notice.


Head parking isn't a big deal anyway. How often are you accessing a storage drive? I have 30k cycles on mine after 10000 hours and ~25000 of those were due to HWMonitor polling SMART data every minute, unbeknownst to me.