Green Hard Drives for gaming and playing hd videos

[claw999]

Hi, I would like to know whether a 1.5 or 2 TB green hard drive (WD, Samsung, Seagate,Hitachi) is good enough for gaming ( assuming the only way I will be losing out is on the loading time) and playing HD videos compared to a normal hdd like the samsung hd240UI? I've seen a strong anti-green hard drive element throughout the internet and I want to know why.

 

[kit_fox]

If you are looking to save some money they should be alright, however you will definitely notice heavy disk use when trying to buffer data which could decrease your HDD life. I would stay away from the Green series drives and concentrate on looking at the Blue drives if you are trying to stay budget concious. Black will always be your high performance but the green drives can lead to headaches down the road unless you are just using them for long term storage.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Well, in multiplayer/online games most times you don't want to be the last player to join the server/map as it may be a disadvantage.

 

[claw999]

I have a kingston HyperX 3k 240 gb as my main system Drive which i will use for new games; but all videos and old games will definitely go on to the hdd. So to my understanding the green drives are basically a few notches better than storing data on DVDs ? Is the seagate Barracuda ok?

 

[kit_fox]

Claw,

I found this article on Storage Effect that I think will be very helpful in answering your question. Its a Q&A with the marketing manager of the Barracuda line at seagate answering why they stopped making the green line. as far as Barracuda drive reliability, I've never had an issue before it being time to upgrade. I hope this information helps.

EDIT- It would have helped had i included the link:

http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/2011/11/storage-effect/why-seagate-said-goodbye-to-green-drives/

 

[shawn808]

I have 10 of those 2 TB green drives.

I can stream 1080p Bluray rips with ease off them.

I also use a gigabit network but when i stream from server to pc or server to networked TV it never exceeds a 10/100 connection.

I wouldnt game off it though.

I have a SSD for that plus 2 / 2TB Blacks in raid for games.

 

[claw999]

Ok thanks everyone, turns out the one in the shop has been mislabelled as a green, actually I asked whether it was green, he didnt know what green was, I asked whether it was sata 3, he said it was sata 2,so i did a rough check on whether it was green online (it wasn't), MODEL- ST2000DM001. Could someone please check whether there were any previous generations or something like that? maybe thats what i bought

 

[claw999]

If mine is sata-6gbps is there any difference in connecting to sata 3gbps instead since hdds are 210 mbps

 

[Hawkeye22]

All sata is backward compatible. It will work. Hard drives can't reach sata2 speeds so it's fine. Sata3 is mostly for SSD's high speed performance.

 

[claw999]

Ok thanks, so anyway the hard drive i bought is good for my work right?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Will it work, yes. Do I recommend it for gaming, no.

 

[AndersW]

As someone who has a SSD as a boot drive and a 2TB WD green for everything else, including games. I can say that, YES it will affect your gaming.

 

[kit_fox]

As someone who has a SSD as a boot drive and a 2TB WD green for everything else, including games. I can say that, YES it will affect your gaming.

+1

I thought about going this route as well but decided against it as the poster can attest to. Ideally everything stored on an SSD is ideal but not realistic to most peoples budget scenario. I would recommend a smaller SSD as a boot drive and any drive labelled as "black", any velociraptor drive or if your budget is really crunched going with at least the blue series drives as their data IO is usually much better than the green drives. "green" drives usually work by using a lower spindle speed and when they are not actively reading or writing by spinning completely down and going into a sort of standy mode both of which negatively impact the higher needed disk IO for gaming or other HDD intensive tasks

 

[claw999]

There is some kind of mistake, my drive isnt a wd caviar green, this is my drive: http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/barracuda/?sku=ST2000DM001, as i mentioned earlier.

 

[claw999]

Best answer selected by claw999.