Seagate 2TB Caviar Green 5900RPM drives.

This is more of an informational topic than a question, but: Over the last two weeks, I've acquired four of these drives. The first two were on sale for $80, but I paid the full $99 for the last two. I've been using three of them in a software raid(Linux MD raid on Debian Testing) for a backup server, and the fourth for an offline backup of some stuff I wanted a spare copy of. Anyway, I have to say I'm very impressed with these drives. I've been getting somewhere over 120MB/sec linear read(Note: was tested on my slow server, so it could be even faster) and around 130MB/sec linear *write* over the entire drive. I was surprised at how /little/ the speed dropped off near the end of the drive, but that could be just good firmware. From what I've seen so far, I recommend them to anyone building a backup or media server. Anyway, has anyone else had any experience with these? I'd assume they wouldn't be super great for a boot drive due to the lower RPM, but I've never tried - they might be perfectly great due to their high density per platter.

TheLexMachine wrote:
WD drive speeds go up and down as needed with the Green drives.
Nope: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/western_digital_caviar_green_2tb
Also, while I can't point to any proof, I know that someone did an audio-analysis on the /1/TB Caviar Greens, and it turns out that the speed appeared to be, in fact, 5400RPM(though WD wouldn't publically admit to it).
TheLexMachine wrote:
They have 5400 RPM drives but those are the Blue drives and not the Green ones.
If you had looked at WD's own product spec sheet, you'd know that this was wrong. Both the Blue and Black drives are 7200RPM; the blue's are just cheaper and not *quite* as fast(according to various benchmarks I've seen)
TheLexMachine wrote:
As for the Barracuda LP drives, they seem to have a significant failure rate or at least they did last time I checked as the line is prone to defects and design flaws, which is why people generally shun them in favor of the WD Green drives.
I saw that -- to some extent, anyway -- when I was on Newegg, and I intended to get WD Caviar Greens 1.5TB's. Unfortunately, BBY's deal on them was web-only, so I got what was available in-store; in this case, 2TB Barracuda Green's. So far, I've been extremely impressed by the performance level, and I've got some redundancy so I'm not *too* worried about failures(And I've been working towards getting all three disks in my raid to have been from different lots so they don't fail all at once), but we'll just have to see in the months ahead.
Entropy wrote:
I don't know about the new "green" Barracudas but I generally rely on the non-"green" Barracudas.
The last time I tried switching to WD (earlier this year with a 1TB unit) was a nightmare. The disk's onboard controller would randomly freeze up and drop its SATA link. Attempting to retrieve SMART status from Linux would cause the drive to instantly hang.
That's interesting: I've had about 6 of the 640GB Caviar Blue's; absolutely no issues on Linux or Windows. You could have had slightly-bad drive, just with some part of the controller failing.

Similar Messages

Will this hard drive (Seagate ST1500DL003 Barracuda Green Hard Drive) work in a mac pro?

Have a mac pro at my church that has a 500 gb and a 1 tb hard drive but since we do a lot of video editing on it the hard drive fills up fast but was wondering if the Seagate ST1500DL003 Barracuda Green Hard Drive
would work in the mac pro 1,1 just need some more storage and maybe a time machine back-up?

I have seen a lot of change in Green drives and new models, be sure the reason it is cheap is trying to off load and get rid of stock.
Some people have no trouble and use them without issue. External USB for TimeMachine can result in the drive parking and OS X and TimeMachine losing communicating. While others have used them even in arrays inside w/o trouble.
3TB Green has been popular. I've only used 1 and 1.5TB though.

MSI K7N2Delta Platinum/ILSR + 2TB WD Caviar GREEN

Hi!
What is the difference between this two old motherboards? Do anyone would work recognize a 2TB Caviar Green drive? I need to add this disk to an old socket A machine to be used as storage/backup.
THanks in advance!

i would doubt that any socket A machine is capable of using a 2TB hard drive at full capacity as they where never even on the horizon when made by a long time because the socket A boards are now ancient!
i don't even think 1TB drives where around then as your board was built in the time of windows 2000! if i remeber correctly the max capacity at that time was around 100-250GB at most!
i may be wrong but i believe it cant be done (could be wrong but its a long shot)!
id suggest scrapping it and buying a low end modern motherboard+cheap ram and a cheap cpu for $150 as a backup and storage device as i dont think a socket A board can even do it!

WD Caviar Green 2TB - disappearing drive

Hi all,
I have installed a 2TB WD drive for use as a time machine drive. (expanding from 1TB external)
Sometimes the disk displays odd characteristics, such as:
• Overnight (last night for example) TM didn't do any further backups after 7.43pm. This caused system preferences to crash and of course TM wasn't accessible. And Finder also hung. So I restarted...
• But because of whatever reason the computer wouldn't restart, so now I had to do a hard restart, but the WD drive wouldn't show up.
• I shut down, remove the drive from its bay (bay 2), put it back in, restart and all is well again.
*Now, is this a low power/sleep issue?* It would seem that the hard restart would remove that question.
*Is it a jumper settings issue?* Removing the drive and putting it back in would seem to eliminate that issue. (for the record, they are at OPT1 enabled, as that seemed to work best at the time.)
Does anyone know what the best way forward is? It would seem to me that neither the drive or the Mac are broken (there was a 500gb WD in that bay before with no problems) and when the drive is mounted - it seems to work fine, until I'm not around then there is a problem.
I would prefer to allow my drives to sleep when unused, but is switching that preference off the only option?
Thanks,
Aaron

Why or what jumper setting is that for? default as is with none.
Removing and installing again isn't going to change anything.
It comes with SSC and OPT1 Disabled. Leave it that way.
And I would not allow drives to spin down.
I am also not a big fan if at all of TimeMachine (think after 3 yrs but no) so I favor SuperDuper, CCC and Tri-Backup 5.
Is it a jumper settings issue? Removing the drive and putting it back in would seem to eliminate that issue. (for the record, they are at OPT1 enabled, as that seemed to work best at the time.)
10.5.6 and above should be fine. Even with the newest version (with 64MB cache).
Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=773
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?groupid=608
What I do with any new WD drive is run it through WD Lifeguard (in Windows 7) and do full extended test, full format with zero.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608
There have been issues with 2TB drives in Mac Pro 1,1 (often as last in bay #4 it seemed).
How about mounting in external FW400?

Are these Seagate 2TB drives compatible in my Mac Pro Quad Core 2.66 GHz?

I still have an Apple Mac Pro "Quad Core" 2.66 that was introduced August 7, 2006. I currently have 4 of the following Seagate internal hard drives installed: ST3750640AS SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.10 - HARD DRIVE - 750 GB - INTERNAL - 3.5" - SATA-300 - 7200 RPM - BUFFER: 16 MB
I want to know if these hard drives will work in this computer: Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive.This computer is powered by two 2.66 GHz dual core Intel Xeon 5150 processors.
The old drives were purchased from NewEgg and I want to purchase the new ones from there also. Are these 2TB drives compatible in my computer?
Thanks,
Lou Hosta

SATA is SATA.
Apple introduced GPT (GUID) years ago to support 2TB and larger (default partition scheme).
SATA III is also backward compatible with SATA II (otherwise, who would Seagate have to sell to?)
The only issues have been with green drives, using green version for RAID or for performance purposes.

I have a Seagate 2TB external hard drive partitioned with one partition of Snow Leopard (my computer is running Lion). Can't seem to reboot using the option key. Any ideas as to what's wrong?

I have a Seagate 2TB external hard drive with 3 partitions, one for Snow Leopard - my computer has Lion. I cannot seem to boot from this hard drive but I could yesterday. Any ideas?

Didnt help. The night I asked this question I was able to reboot from the external hard drive after running Disk repair (which said everything was fine). Tonight I have tried again and cannot boot from the external. So I tried the Safe Mode restart and then chose restart with the option key held down as well as shutting down and trying holding down the option key while turning on the power. I have never been able to reboot just choosing restart and holding down the option key. Whenever the reboot from the external has worked I've had to shut down and hold the option key while turning the power on. Now that is not working. My computer is brand new as is the hard drive. I don't know where to go from here.
I can access the drive just fine while I'm in Lion. I just can't boot up using it. Help!

WD Caviar Green drives - Only good for certain uses!

I originally set up my Mac Pro as follows:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The RAID 1 array was mounted as the /User directory.
From the start there were annoying lags on a semi-regular basis. Even with only a few things open, like 1 instance each of Dreamweaver, Safari, and iTunes, I would get the spinning beach-ball of death for a few seconds every 30-45 seconds, and sometimes for as long as 10-20 seconds. Occasionally iTunes would actually cut out as it tried to play music.
Whenever these problems got bad I checked the Activity Monitor, did a 'top' in the terminal, even ran diagnostics a few times. No problems were ever obvious. Tons of available CPU time, tons of available RAM, no disk problems. Still, the system ran like a 386 with 640kb of RAM, not a 3.0Ghz Quad-core Nehalem with 12GB of RAM!
I started suspecting the disks as the culprit and looked into the Caviar Green drives a little further...
Western Digital lists the spindle speed as "Variable 5400-7200 RPM'. In fact, each drive is tested to determine the speed with the best performance/economy balance, and that speed is locked into the drive. This means that two otherwise identical Caviar Green drives can have two widely different spindle speeds. Put those two into a striped RAID array, and you get the problems I had.
Before reporting a bad computer to AppleCare I decided to confirm the drive theory by replacing the two Caviar Green drives in the RAID array with Caviar Black drives. Right now I have 4 instances of Safari, 2 Terminals, 2 Finder windows, Dreamweaver, Remote Desktop, Photoshop and iTunes running, and have seen zero glitches so far. The system is finally running like it should! The Caviar Green drive I have in bay 4 as my Time Machine backup is fine - this is actually a good application for these quieter, lower power drives. Just don't put them into a RAID array where you expect reasonable performance!
The two Green drives are going back to NewEgg tomorrow (minus a restocking fee because I am past the 30-day return window).
P.S., The Caviar Black drives are just fine for a software-based RAID 0 or RAID 1 array like this. WD makes the more expensive RE3 drives for RAID arrays, but the only difference is the amount of time the drive is allowed to take for error recovery. The Black drive could be down long enough to be dropped from an array (10 seconds or more), but the RE3 always comes back within 7 seconds after error recovery to prevent this. So you only benefit from the RE3 drives if you are running with a hardware RAID card, like you'd need for RAID 5.

Sorry, typo...
Table should say RAID 0, not RAID 1:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The *RAID 0* array was mounted as the /User directory.

My IMac 21.5 mid 2010's HD is going bad on it, after upgrading to mavericks it slowed way down and after it shut off and now won't come back on, would Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB Serial ATA Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 64MB, SATA 6Gb/s worked?

My IMac 21.5 mid 2010's HD is going bad on it, after upgrading to mavericks it slowed way down and after it shut off and now won't come back on, I call apple support and they told me to bring it in but the nearest store is about two hours away. They said I need it to erase my hard drive but I have too many family pics on it.
would Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB Serial ATA Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 64MB, SATA 6Gb/s worked on it? I could replace the internal and get an enclosure for the original until I get the pics out of it?
Please advise, it's like five years of family pics I don't wanna loose them and I am worried.
Thanks
Al Florez

A Brody,
I really apprecate your very quick respond, Its too late to back up as of now, my hard drive wont load at all so I cannot follow your instruction to back it up. Learn a hard lesson but I will from now on following your link.
Also my hard drive it is not available to do the free exchange program.
I read the OWC instruction on how to replace the drive I was just wondering if the 2TB would work on it instead of the 1 TB they offer, I specifically asked for the Seage Barracuda because I had great experiences with it on PCs.
Again, Thank you

I have an external seagate 2tb drive with 3 partitions each with encrypted passwords. What must I do if one of the drives won't recognize it's password?

I have an external seagate 2tb drive with 3 partitions each with encrypted passwords. What must I do if one of the drives won't recognize it's password?

I would have to say the LCD display or possibly the inverter as the graphics adapter can properly output to an external monitor. This would be repaired under warranty.
\\ I do not respond to PM regarding individual tech support. Keep discussions in the forum for the benefit of others //

Formatted 2TB WD Green drive showing 820MB on disk

Hi, I have a newly formatted 2TB WD Green drive. It is completely empty however it is saying that there is 820.6MB used on the disk. The drive is completely empty, when I look at the invisible files on the drive there is only a .DS_Store file taking 10KB.
Where is the mystery amount going? I was thinking that maybe there were some bad blocks that have been written out but so far a TechTool 7 surface scan is nearly 80% of the way done, but no bad blocks to be found.
When I told the OS not to Spotlight search the drive, it still says that there is 819.8MB on disk.
What am I missing here?
Cheers and thanks,
Andrew.

Hi, thanks for the quick reply;
a couple things that I forgot to mention was that the drive is sitting in a fairly new external USB enclosure purchased from Other World Computing that I've had a 3TB drive in. The reason for the Green drive versus a Black one is that it is to be connected as an additional drive to my Time Capsule because energy and temperatures are something that I want to reduce. This was purchased before the Red drives started to become more affordable.
Anyway, I do know that when a larger drive is used in an enclosure or Mac that can't handle that size, the drive doesn't report the true Capacity of the drive but rather one limited to one that the hardware can handle. This is not the case, as you can see in the attached screenshot.
Also I'm running on a MacBook Pro supporting Yosemite, so I don't think age is an issue.
(In the screenshot right, I am wondering why the highlighted amount is on my newly formatted and empty drive.)
Cheers, Andrew.

Big problem with new WD Caviar Green HDD, please advise!

I bought a new Western Digital Caviar Green HDD 1TB, ( WD10EADS ) it is a SATA 3Gb/s interface HDD, 3.5-inch form factor. the RPM = IntelliPower (NOT 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM which means Rotate automatically depends on the needs of fetching data I suppose?)
I acknowledged that this series of HDD which three of 6 have the same Power Management which Read/Write = 4.9W / Idle = 2.8W / Standby = 0.4 W / Sleep = 0.4W
They are differ from the other 3, which 500GB one is 4.1W / 2.2W / 0.8W / 0.8W and 1.5TB is 4.73W 2.75W / 0.72W / 0.72W; 2TB is 6W 3.7W 0.8W 0.8W
Which mean the Standby and Sleep mode are the same state.
Now my big problem is, I bought an external dock SI-7908UI for this WD Caviar Green HDD.
( http://www.ssi.com.tw/product_content.aspx?id=92 )
So I first put the HDD into the SI-7908UI Dock ( USB 2.0 / eSATA / Firewire 400 /800 )
I tried many way of sequence of who power on first? WD Caviar Power on first? or Mac mini Power on first? I found that the best way is Mac mini Power on first, then Power on the external HDD.
OK, before I address my big problem, I should let you know, I found that there is NO S.M.A.R.T. working when you put a S.M.A.R.T. HDD outside the Mac or PC. In Dock, the S.M.A.R.T. won't work, That's how I saw in System Profiler, the FireWire tab says " S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported "
and I did test a Non-Green Maxtor HDD, the S.M.A.R.T. doesn't show either. You'll need this info before the real problem I'm gonna say in the following.
NOW, about 10~15 minutes after my Mac mini boot, if I didn't fetch anything from my external HDD, it would goes to sleep itself, that confirmed that the Specification Sheet was true, the Idle = 2.8W and I believe it goes to Idle, NOT Standby or Sleep, which I also believe the Standby or Sleep signal is supposed to be given by Mac OS, but it sounds like Standby or Sleep, BECAUSE the WD HDD suddenly not rotate and the sound it appears that it goes to SLEEP, am I right? I keep Mac awake by browsing the web so Mac mini won't go to sleep (I set 10 minutes in Energy Saver and I checked Put the HDD to sleep when possible)
Well, That is my big problem when WD Green HDD goes to sleep, because I CAN'T wake it up, NOT eject or Shut down the Mac mini. (OK, I'm NOT sure if it goes to Sleep or Idle)
First I thought it freezes the whole Mac OS, then I found I still can move many things, such as I am doing right now, post this big problem here. but I am sure the others are freeze! and no matter how many time I click Shut Down or Restart or Force Quit, the Mac mini didn't respond.
I tried to figure it out because I don't want to Shut Down by force.(5 seconds Press the Power button)
then I found that if I power down the external dock 7908-UI when Mac fail to shut down/restart/or eject the external HDD, It worked.
And the Mac OS will appear a window says that "I shouldn't unplug an external device without Ejecting it first" something like that. and suddenly it shuts down very quickly, everything back to normal, it shut down successfully.
What am I gonna do with this? Am I going to power down my external HDD first every time I want to shut down/eject/restart? Because the Eject the external HDD will cause freeze too! Freeze Finder I suppose.
Is it caused by 7908-UI ? or Caused by WD Caviar's Green Power management?
Because I don't trust 7908-UI, it doesn't look like a trusted brand, I've never heard of this SSI company anyway.
What am I gonna do? Please advise.
Thanks in advance.

Please realise that I am not the right person to be asking. I pointed you to a thread where, as a Moderator at the Bombich forums, I felt the need to warn users of CCC that a WD drive might cause problems. The thread mainly just copies what WD have said.
Obviously your drive will respond/awake/spin up when you access it manually. Some of the problems are...
•  Most users want to be in control of whether and/or when a drive sleeps -- WD's auto-sleep cannot be disabled and so precludes that.
•  Most users want their drive to obey settings in Energy Saver -- the WD auto-sleep mechanism doesn't allow that.
•  Most users want a scheduled cloning/backup to take place during the night. The cloning app starting the backup process should cause the target drive, if sleeping, to wake/spin up so that the process can take place -- it does for all drives except WD drives where the auto-sleep mechanism used doesn't allow it. LaCie drives, for instance, have auto-sleep +as an option+, during which the drive will respond to Energy Saver settings and to software such as a cloning app.
Please, Mauricette, put you questions/concerns/problems to the reseller or to WD, both of whom took your money without warning you. I am NOT a WD expert! ...or lover! ( ) I became more than disenchanted when I saw that a) WD do not point out the limitations of their external drives at point of sale, and b) WD put the blame for these inadequacies/problems/limitations onto Apple, ignoring the fact that no drives other than WD drives have them.
Andreas

3tb wd caviar green

hi i have a mac pro 8 core 2008 and i am just wanting to know can you upgrade the mac pro to the 3tb wd caviar green with the SATA 6 Gb/s or can you only use what apple say and thats the 3 GB/s
many thanks
BAZz

Never buy a drive from Apple unless you use the Apple Pro RAID card. Maybe. Which does not support 3TB.
Green are best not used for performance or system but fine for backups. Not everyone is totally happy though but some are in using them for data drives (frequent parking and spin down to go green).
No reason to use old tech. You want the 64MB cache 6G edition.
Apple charges way more than say Newegg or Amazon.
WD Black is your best for performance drive which $124 for 1TB @ 'Egg and very nice. Don't think they have more than 2TB in Black though as yet.

Add Seagate 2TB External HDD to Oracle VM /OVS

Hello guys,
I have got a empty Seagate 2TB External HDD with NTFS partition And I want to add this as addition storage to my Oracle VM Server in OVS partition.
Also this 2TB USB HDD is solely dedicated to Oracle VM so I am not bothering about Any other operating systems.
To accomplish my this purpose I have gone through so many online forum to convert Seagate ntfs partition to Linux partition. But I couldn't find success.
So Here my questions are :
1) Is it possible to convert USB HDD ntfs partition to Oracle VM Server supported partition that can run VM Machine on it ?
2) If Answer is Yes, then Could you explain me how do I do that ?
Many Thanks
Hemesh

Hi Herbert,
Thanks for your reply,
So it means I have to create OCFS2 file system on external Hard drive.
Thanks
Hemesh.

Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive Experiences

I was wondering is Mac users general had good experience with the Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive? I was thinking about getting either the 1TB or 2TB for backup/storage.
It also says it has pre-loaded NTFS driver for the Mac. And the drive can be read by both PC and Mac. How does that work? And does anyone know if it is formatted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?
Also, what does journaling actual do. I read a few conflicting threads, it either actively defrags to increase speed and prevent data corruption especially in the case of a power outage or it significantly slows down the disk.

That drive is bus-powered, meaning it can get power only from the computer's USB ports. Unless you need small size so you can pack the drive around with you while traveling, consider instead a self-powered drive. If traveling with the drive is not an issue, also consider a larger desktop-type drive that holds a 3.5-inch form factor drive. The larger drives are historically more durable than the 2.5-inch laptop drives as would be installed in the Seagate you linked.
There are a fair number of reports in these forums of bus-powered drives working for a time and then not being recognized. With age, electric motors can demand more power than when new and, if that demand exceeds what a USB port can provide, the drive stops working.
IF you MUST use a laptop-class mobile external on a desktop computer, at minimum consider adding a self-powered USB hub to the purchase. It will overcome any lack of power issues the drive experiences:
NewerTech 7 Port Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Hub with Power Adapter for Mac & PC
OWC makes a mobile, bus-powered drive that can also use an optional power brick--best of both worlds. I have one and like its having a FireWire interface. However, you have a choice of interfaces:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/EliteALmini/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

Caviar Green compatible with MacBook Pro 13.3"

Is the WD Caviar Green 1 TB compatible with the MacBook Pro 13.3"?

Hopefully you mean in an external enclosure. It certainly _will not_ fit inside the MBP (it's a drive for desktop computers). Even externally, not really. It requires a SATA connection, and there's not one on the 13" MBP, nor is there an expansion slot to add one. You could (in theory) get a SATA to USB adapter, but that would defeat the purpose of an eSATA drive...
WD did recently announce 750 GB and 1 TB laptop drives:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=685
The 1 TB model isn't shipping quite yet. Also, those drives are too tall to fit in a 13" MBP (they will fit in a 17" MBP). The maximum sized internal drive for a 13" MBP is currently 500 GB.

Seagate 2TB Caviar Green 5900RPM drives.

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