Western Digital WD vs Seagate Green hard disks – PC Accessories Review

Ever since I started using Network Access Storage (NAS), I have switched to use Green hard disks, in line with an aim to save energy consumption. TO me there is no great difference in performance, at least observable for now when primarily the traffic to my blog is still growing and video streaming is not my key activity.

However, there are know differences between the Green hard disk vs a High Performance one (Black):

1. The Black hard drive’s performance is considered to be far better than the Green hard drive’s performance.
2. The Black is noisy, and also consumes more power. On the other hand, the Green makes less noise, and has a more efficient power consumption rate.
3. While the Green hard drive has a 5400-rpm speed, the Black hard drive has a 7200-rpm speed.
4. The Green drives use only 35 percent less energy when writing or reading, when compared to Black drives.
5. The Green drives are cheaper than the Blacks drives.

As of now, there are a few major types of Green hard disk:

Western Digital (WD) : WD AV-GP, WD20EARS
Seagate :  ST2000DL003, ST32000542AS

I would discourage Western Digital WD AV-GP.

The AV drives ignore errors, the normal drives will do an error recovery to attempt to get back any data from the platter.
When recording video (security cameras etc) you want an AV drive that will just record whatever you throw at it, and keep going even if it misses a byte or two. An error in a couple of bytes just causes a minor blip in the video stream, but the rest won’t stop. On a normal drive it could go into an error recovery mode and stop recording for 10-30 seconds – and this is much worse for security.

However if you store documents, a single byte error could corrupt megabytes or even gigabytes of important data.

I would strongly recommend Seagate ST2000DL003 which is a SATA3 model with transfer speed max at 6Gbps with the other models at 3Gbps.

MORE SPECIFICATIONS (extracted from Manufacturer’s website):

WD AV-GP ( WD20EURS) Performance Specifications Rotational Speed IntelliPower * Buffer Size 64 MB Acoustics (Sone) < 1 Transfer Rates Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max) Physical Specifications Formatted Capacity 2,000,398 MB Capacity 2 TB Interface SATA 3 Gb/s User Sectors Per Drive 3,907,029,168 Physical Dimensions English Height 1.028 Inches Depth 5.787 Inches Width 4.00 Inches Weight 1.40 Pounds Metric Height 26.1 mm Depth 147 mm Width 101.6 mm Weight 0.64 kg Environmental Specifications Shock Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms Non-operating Shock 250G, 2 ms Acoustics Idle Mode 24 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 25 dBA (average) Temperature (English) Operating 32° F to 140° F Non-operating -40° F to 158° F Temperature (Metric) Operating -0° C to 60° C Non-operating -40° C to 70° C Electrical Specifications Current Requirements Power Dissipation Read/Write 4.50 Watts Idle 4.00 Watts Standby 0.70 Watts Sleep 0.70 Watts

WD Caviar Green 2 TB SATA Hard Drives ( WD20EARS) Performance Specifications Rotational Speed IntelliPower * Buffer Size 64 MB Transfer Rates Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max) Physical Specifications Formatted Capacity 2,000,398 MB Capacity 2 TB Interface SATA 3 Gb/s User Sectors Per Drive 3,907,029,168 Physical Dimensions English Height 1.028 Inches Depth 5.787 Inches Width 4.00 Inches Weight 1.61 Pounds Metric Height 26.1 mm Depth 147 mm Width 101.6 mm Weight 0.73 kg Environmental Specifications Shock Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms Non-operating Shock 250G, 2 ms Acoustics Idle Mode 24 dBA (average) Seek Mode 0 29 dBA (average) Seek Mode 3 25 dBA (average) Temperature (English) Operating 32° F to 140° F Non-operating -40° F to 158° F Temperature (Metric) Operating -0° C to 60° C Non-operating -40° C to 70° C Electrical Specifications Current Requirements 12 VDC Read/Write 296 mA Idle 243 mA Standby 3 mA Sleep 3 mA 5 VDC Read/Write 503 mA Idle 172 mA Standby 160 mA Sleep 160 mA Power Dissipation Read/Write 6.00 Watts Idle 3.70 Watts Standby 0.80 Watts Sleep 0.80 Watts