Difference between WD BLACKS and GREENS

[hok]

I read alot on the forums that WD's BLACKS and GREEN do not have a practical difference and that the GREENS speed up to 7200rpm when pushed.

However i ran some benchmarks and found there is a slight difference and just wanted to show it here. I have both drives in pairs in RAID 0 and ran HD Tune.

Here are the results: i guess one could say its not a huge difference, but looking back i would have rathered spend the extra 20 $ for the BLACKS. But i since i will be upgrading to the Intel G2 i need to save my dollars...

 

[grieve]

The difference is rather large i think... Thanks for the info.

 

[Paperdoc]

My understanding is that the Greens don't "speed up when pushed". Instead, they operate at 7200 rpm like other drives when in use, but after some period of non-use they slow down to 5400 rpm, then speed back up when used. This saves substantially on power consumption when not being used. They also use a system called "Intelliseek" to move the heads for seek operations which reduces power used for that, but they claim this does not impact seek time and performance.

Do yours have the same cache on board? It appears all the blacks have 32 MB, but some smaller greens have 16 MB. Many will say that makes little difference, anyway.

Irrespective of design considerations and maker's claims, it is always good to know real world performance by actual measurement. Thanks for giving us that.

 

[csodey]

I used to be a Seagate fan until the 7200.10 disaster. Now all I use are WDs. I have always bought blacks and after reading this I think I will stick with them To me hard drives use so little power there is no use in buying low power units unless you are building a NAS. Thanks for the info.

 

[cjl]

My understanding is that the Greens don't "speed up when pushed". Instead, they operate at 7200 rpm like other drives when in use, but after some period of non-use they slow down to 5400 rpm, then speed back up when used. This saves substantially on power consumption when not being used. They also use a system called "Intelliseek" to move the heads for seek operations which reduces power used for that, but they claim this does not impact seek time and performance.

Do yours have the same cache on board? It appears all the blacks have 32 MB, but some smaller greens have 16 MB. Many will say that makes little difference, anyway.

Irrespective of design considerations and maker's claims, it is always good to know real world performance by actual measurement. Thanks for giving us that.

Actually, they don't change spin speed at all. The Greens spin at somewhere around 6000RPM (they don't specify the actual number), and they spin at this speed for idle or for full load. That's why the sequential transfer rate is lower. It's also how they save power.

 

[hok]

After using for a week and doing a lot of transferring from rebuilding and encrypting container files, burning encoding etc etc. I have not been able to "see" a difference from the Blacks and the Greens. I don't get the AVG 160 Mb.sec in practical use all the time (but i also don't get the Green AVG either) However i can actually see a difference when i Read from my greens and write to my blacks from when i read from the blacks to my greens. I can clearly see about 30Mb/sec diff. time and time again. So i would stick with blacks guys. I'm actually amazed there is such a difference and also the effect of everything else on HD performance (CPU, type of transfer etc..) Whats really crazy is that Windows 7 transfer infromation is really accurate from green to black i get very close to the HD tune benchmark, i'm really kicking myself for buying two greens... it was so small a difference in price.

 

[Mongox]

Oh man, but I was thinking about a Blue! I don't see anything on the Blues here - any reason not to get one? I've heard about the Green's slow-down as a minus.

I guess all the Blues have 16MB buffers (smallest ones have 8MB) so they'd perform worse than a Black. Any other differences?

 

[hok]

how much cheaper is a blue?

I would just get the black...

 

[jsc]

I have one 640 Black for OS and programs and two 1 TB Greens for storage in my gaming and multimedia system. The combination has worked great for me.

All three drives are in the lower bay of an Antec 900 case. HD temps have never risen above 29 C.

However, if I were to get one drive, it would be a Black.

 

[amnotanoobie]

I used to be a Seagate fan until the 7200.10 disaster.

It was the .11's not the 10's.

After using for a week and doing a lot of transferring from rebuilding and encrypting container files, burning encoding etc etc. I have not been able to "see" a difference from the Blacks and the Greens.

I noticed the difference when using Green as an OS drive, or loading some app off of it. But when it comes to general desktop usage, it is a fairly "ok" drive.

 

[topper743]

Are the burst rates dipicted in the graphs normal? 1125.2 MB/s?

 

[cjl]

They're normal for an Intel array with the write-back cache enabled (actually, they're a bit slow if anything)...

 

[hok]

Yup... deciding on whether to get a dedicated card... if i want to spend 400 bucks i am taking some time since i would want to get an 8 port at least...

also weighing it against getting an intel SSD as a system drive.

the intel array is just from a cheapo Gigabyte ds3p...