WD Green drives for media

Forum Storage : Hard Drives WD Green drives for media

So I'm looking for a new harddrive to hold a ton of video, music, and picture files. There are alot of movies that can range up to hi-def. Are WD Green drives appropriate for constant video watching? Will it take a long time to spool up and load into WMP?
I do not plan to install games or programs onto this drive. I am attracted to the WD green drives by the low power usage and low heat, however these concerns may not even be an issue with my computer.

I am currently looking at this WD green drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 22-136-513

It is cheap, with plenty of space, however I am worried about the large complaints of DOAs. I thought WD was a reliable brand? Should I look at other brands, or other WD green models? Any recommendations?

Thanks!

Reply to hstorm101

Green drives are great as storage drives. Constant video watching kind of defeats the purpose of a green drive because you are saving the most energy when the drive is in idle mode. Watching movies will not allow the drive to idle, but it should still use less power than a standard drive.

Reply to Hawkeye22

Yes you are right. I must clarify that I don't watch videos constantly, but many times in a day. My main concern is whether or not the WD green drive is fast enough to bring up video files in a short amount of time. If these green drives are able to do that, I would prefer them over say a Black drive due to heat/power use. Or is the difference negligible?
Also, are there any comments on the particular newegg link I posted?

Reply to hstorm101

I have several of the WD green drive for about 2 years now, no DOA or dead drive yet. They can stream video, no problem. Transfer rate of the drive range from about a bit over 100MB/s when empty to about 60-70 when 75 percent full.

Message edited by Pyree on 07-12-2011 at 08:45:34 PM

Reply to Pyree

I have been checking out newegg's reviews and there seems to be a very high failure DOA rate for this drive. I am really not sure which drive to look for now.

Reply to hstorm101

hstorm101
You should use the Green drive to store and watch media content.
1) Consume less power ==> not hot ==> last longer
2) Assume you are watching Blu-ray file which is about 60Mb/s max. This bit rate is nothing compare the the actual transfer rate of the green drive.
3) I have so many WD_green drives that currently use, some of them even in the raid array.

Reply to FireWire2

Green drives consume less power than a standard drive even while they're running - so you'll save power even if you do watch videos all the time.

You may experience a delay of a few seconds if you try to access the drive after a long period of inactivity. But once the drive is spun up it will play videos & music just fine. The transfer rates required to play media files are very low - just a few MByte/sec. Green drives can transfer data in the range of 50-100MByte/sec or more, depending on the model, so you really don't need to be concerned about performance for that type of usage.

So far I have 5 Green drives in a mix of 1TB and 2TB capacities - they've all worked just fine with no issues whatsoever.

Reply to sminlal

WD green harddrives are ideal for storage, streaming media, and are quiet, cool and power efficient drives.
but i wouldn't suggest making it the system drive as well, my HTPC used to kick into defragmentation or various other automated HDD intensive background operations during the middle of movie resulting in stuttered playback, quite annoying.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to Branden

Branden wrote :

...my HTPC used to kick into defragmentation or various other automated HDD intensive background operations during the middle of movie resulting in stuttered playback, quite annoying.

It seems to me that a decent media player would be able to buffer enough of the movie in RAM to avoid that problem. It doesn't all that much RAM do do that. For example buffering 100MBytes (which only takes a second or two to read from disk) would suffice to play back more than 30 seconds of high definition video. During that 30 seconds the media player shouldn't have any problem getting the next 100MBytes read so that it's ready to play the next 30 seconds' worth.

Failing that, in Windows 7 there are remedies such as modifying the Task Scheduler settings so that defragmentation is only done when the system is idle.

Reply to sminlal

^+1 sminlal. Given enough tasks, even a enterprise class ssd will stutter when playing video. Sometimes the user will have to take responsibility to if their computer's performance degrade.

Message edited by Pyree on 07-13-2011 at 05:02:21 AM

Reply to Pyree

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