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Beware the WD Green Drives

That headline sounds a little foreboding, but this is important: If you are expanding your storage at home, be careful of choosing WD Green drives - only certain model numbers are good.

A while ago I upgraded my Windows Home Server storage with an eSATA port multiplier and some 1TB WD Green drives. A few months later I added more storage in the form of a 2TB WD Green drive.

During this time, I had installed PerfectDisk on the Windows Home Server and was using that to defrag my drives. When running it, I'd get all sorts of errors on random drives... but during regular day-to-day use, there were no problems. I was pretty well convinced this was a problem with PerfectDisk since that application was the only one causing issues. I couldn't have PerfectDisk enabled for more than a couple of days before the server would blue screen or hang and require a hard reboot.

After all of this trouble, I started losing faith in the reliability of the server and got a Synology DS1010+ to move my DVD images to - the primary bulk of my data. While researching compatible drives for the DS1010+, I found that there are actually specific notes on their compatibility list about certain model numbers of the WD Green drives testing well and most others causing problems. There are forum posts about this as well.

Per these sources, the only reliable WD Green model numbers are:

  • 2TB: WD20EADS-00R6B0
  • 1.5TB: WD15EADS-00R6B0
  • 1TB: WD10EADS-00L5B1

I looked at my drives in my Windows Home Server and, sure enough, about half of the drives were the "good" model numbers and half were "bad" models. As part of the move to the DS1010+, I reorganized the drives in my Windows Home Server so only the "good" model numbers remained in the system.

I've been running PerfectDisk on the Windows Home Server for a little over two weeks now with no issue.

There are a lot of factors in play here, to be sure.

  • I moved the drives in the WHS around so they're in different slots than they originally were. If there was some sort of problem with a drive being seated incorrectly or a particular slot disagreeing with a particular drive, that may no longer exist.
  • There are fewer drives in the eSATA port multiplier just because there are fewer drives in the system in general. If the port multiplier didn't like having so many drives in it, that issue may not be showing itself now.
  • I moved several terabytes of data off the home server so the majority of the space there is empty. If the problem was with PerfectDisk managing drives that have very little free space, that may not be displaying now.

Even given all of that, it's hard for me to deny that my experience with these drives is backed up by Synology testing and user experience, too. It's not just me. Moving these drives out of my system seems to have increased reliability quite a bit.

YMMV, but my recommendation: Beware the WD Green drives.

posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 8:46 AM | Filed Under [ Media GeekSpeak ]

Comments

Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Holt at 6/17/2010 12:53 PM
I just saw the link to this from mshws.com realized that I have one of the WD15EADS-00P8B0 drives. Recently I started having trouble with .wtv files streaming to media pc and then the xbox. I only have 3 drives and assume that the recorded tv is getting stored on this drive since it is the largest free drive. The server will hang and I can't access shares or console for a bit. After a few minutes, it starts working again. Does this sound like something that has happened in your system? I do have Perfect Disk 10 that I won from mswhs.com installed also. I'm thinking about staying with Black drives from now on.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Travis Illig at 6/17/2010 1:12 PM
It sounds very similar to what was happening for me. Only difference is once my system froze, it would never come back - it would require a hard reboot.

As a test, try disabling PerfectDisk. What I noticed is that once I disabled PerfectDisk, the system would stop freezing. Again, not PD's fault, just that it generates a heavier I/O load on the drives than most other apps.

If disabling PD fixes the problem, I'd guess the problem is the drive.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Ric at 6/17/2010 1:32 PM
I'm having the same issue as Holt - not sure of the model number but I have 2 1.5tb WD Green EADS drives. I don't have perfect disk but do seem to have mode issues when using squeezebox server...
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Ric at 6/17/2010 1:37 PM
(more issues not mode issues)
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by master at 6/18/2010 3:39 AM
I have also the same issue as Holt. The problem can be seen easily when writing something over my gbit network to WHS. After a few (3 - 5) GB you can see big slowdown while writing.
Sometimes i can notice this problem when playing HD or SD movies or series in MCE stored on WHS.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Daniel at 6/20/2010 11:34 AM
This is a user-issue, no problem with the discs. And regarding Synology compatibility, there are a lot of discs they do not support. (I still run a DS207+ for back-ups so have had to deal with this in the past.)

The label on the EARS discs has warning written on it that says the drive should be jumpered for use on Windows XP systems.

Although it's not very clear this also goes for Windows Server 2003 (which WHS is built on) it's not a disk that would typically be used in a server, plus most power users would recognize this potential problem.

I have a large number of 1.5 and 2TB WD disks in use, including jumpered EARS discs and other EADS discs. All are performing great.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by pete at 6/20/2010 1:38 PM
hi,
any experience with WD EACS series drives?

cu
-pete
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Travis Illig at 6/21/2010 7:25 AM
I have no personal experience with the EACS or EARS series drives. Everything I know is posted above.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Galen at 6/21/2010 5:37 PM
The WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (the original 1 TB Green model, I believe) is listed as acceptable on the linked Synology page.
Gravatar # re: Beware the WD Green Drives
by Lord Bear at 7/9/2010 11:11 AM
I can verify this problem from my own experience. I have a LaCie Quadra 1TB eSATA/USB2 external drive which had a WD 1TB "green" drive. After several months of good operation I started seeing errors during large/long file copy operations (I use RoboCopy for some mirroring/backup).

My initial attempts to diagnose had me checking all sorts of things, and pointing the finger at Windows, cables, power supplies and much more. I eventually narrowed it down to the external HD unit.

I had to push really hard to get LaCie to issue a warm-swap replacement unit, but they did. The new unit has a different internal HD (I have not checked the model #) but no problems so far.
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