Please clarify: WD Caviar Green EARS

[eri]

Hello all

I am about to buy a TS-210 and came here to understand what were the best 1-1.5TB drives to plug in. MY idea idea was to use low noise, low power consumption drives like the WD Caviar Green.

Then I read part of the huge thread about those drives and I am a bit confused: is it recommended to install the WD Green series EARS (64MB buffer) or they also suffer from the high cycle count issue? Frankly speaking I would like to avoid the hassle of installing them first on the PC to run the utility to change head parking timeout.

If not recommended, which other drive should I consider for 24H/24 home usage (backup, emule)?

Thanks in advance

E

[sasoc]

Look at my problems: viewtopic.php?f=182&t=25535

I also wanted Green/Low noise/bedroom disc model, but my experience with Samsung is a catastrophe.

Regards,
Sašo

[eri]

I see, but what about EARS drives? I like the idea how silent discs.
Also price is much less than Caviar Black drives, which I understood are fine for the NAS

[schumaku]

Eri,

Following the bad experiences and the dropped support by WDC for NAS/RAID usage of their Desktop drives, I would stay _far_ away from _any_ WDC "internal desktop drives" as listed under http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=3

If you are keen on the EARS, get the confirmation from WDC these disks can safely be used in a NAS and RAID system, and there are no fancy error recovery implementations blocking any disk access for longer than seven seconds.

Sašo,

Any broken disk is leading to problems as you experienced. The bigger the disks, the higher the risks of low level read and write failures. When you had similar issues on the WDC desktop drives going to deep error recovery, things would be worse.

To compare, the WDC desktop drives will not show any information about a deep error recovery process in SMART (once it becomes accessible again after one to two minutes...). Again, in your case, the Samsung F2 were reporting these errors, giving clear failure information.

-Kurt.

[eri]

Hello Kurt and thanks for the very clear answer.

What would you suggest then? Is it feasible to remaining in the range 80-100 Euros/TB?