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WD Caviar Green slowness... any fixes?

Last response: in Storage
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These Caviar Green harddrives are famous for having a short life span and slow transfer speeds because of this IntelliPower feature which automatically returns the drive's headers to their parking position after being idle for 8 seconds or so... (I learned all that in the past hour after wondering why my newly built PC is so slow and why the hard drive scored 5.4 in the windows assessment tool).

My question is: Is there's any way to disable this stupid IntelliPower feature? a firmware update maybe?

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The other reason for slow speeds is the 5400 RPM spindle speed. There is just no way for that to compete with the 7200 RPM of "normal" desktop drives. I would get a faster drive for C: and retire that Green to the storage role it was designed for.
I know of no way to speed them up.

Yeah...the WD Caviar Green drives are not exactly marketed as enthusiast level speed demons. From the WD Website;
Quote:
WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation.


If you want a performance drive from WD, get the Black series, Velociraptors, or an SSD.
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inmood said:
These Caviar Green harddrives are famous for having a short life span and slow transfer speeds because of this IntelliPower feature which automatically returns the drive's headers to their parking position after being idle for 8 seconds or so.


This is a feature. Powering down after a period of inactivity is what helps save energy and is an important part of what makes it a "green" drive. If you don't want that behaviour, don't buy a "green"drive...
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Another I told you so:
You knew, or should have known, that the Green drives were, well, "green" when you bought them. What did you think that "green" meant?

I own three 1 TB Greens - for storage. I would never use one for a boot drive.

True, though let's not forget that 1.5-2.0TB WD Green disks score higher in alot of benchmarks than an older 250-333GB-per-platter 7200rpm disk. In most benchmarks you can't really distinguish them, except those that heavily rely on seeks.

So its not that they are terribly slow for this task; but generally you should use SSD/7200rpm disk for system disk and use Green disks for mass-storage instead.

Thanks guys for the replies... I immediately returned this stupid, slow green harddrive for another Seagate 7200rpm drive. Now things work out just like I'm used to.

Green drive my a$$.

inmood said:
These Caviar Green harddrives are famous for having a short life span and slow transfer speeds because of this IntelliPower feature which automatically returns the drive's headers to their parking position after being idle for 8 seconds or so


Weird. My original Caviar Green 1TB drive has been running for over 10,000 hours and reads about 80MB/second; the slow part is random access, where the low rotation rate starts to hurt.
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