WD GREENCapacity Storage WD Green storage is designed specifically with reliability in mind for an increased drive lifespan. The advantage of being cool and quiet impacts overall reliability while reduced heat output, decreased power consumption, quiet acoustics, and best-in-class power management make WD Green a leader when compared to the competition. Size: 3.5 Inches.
WD GREENCapacity Storage WD Green storage is designed specifically with reliability in mind for an increased drive lifespan. The advantage of being cool and quiet impacts overall reliability while reduced heat output, decreased power consumption, quiet acoustics, and best-in-class power management make WD Green a leader when compared to the competition. Size: 3.5 Inches.
in 1 offers
The lowest price for WD Green WD60EZRX 6TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive right now is $329.00 at PC Case Gear.
The all-time low was $246.72 on 11 Mar 2026 â today's price is 33% above the lowest ever. It has been notably cheaper before â worth setting a price alert.
Prices last updated 10 May 2026.
WD Green WD60EZRX 6TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
WD GREENCapacity Storage WD Green storage is designed specifically with reliability in mind for an increased drive lifespan. The advantage of being cool and quiet impacts overall reliability while reduced heat output, decreased power consumption, quiet acoustics, and best-in-class power management make WD Green a leader when compared to the competition. Size: 3.5 Inches.
WD GREENCapacity Storage WD Green storage is designed specifically with reliability in mind for an increased drive lifespan. The advantage of being cool and quiet impacts overall reliability while reduced heat output, decreased power consumption, quiet acoustics, and best-in-class power management make WD Green a leader when compared to the competition. Size: 3.5 Inches.
Last updated at 10/05/2026 10:20:11
Western Digital WD Green 6TB WD60EZRX
60-day returns
originally posted on neweggbusiness.com
I was excited to receive this hard drive because I am in need of a large capacity internal drive with good power management to use as a backup device for both a 1TB and 3TB drive that Iâm using to store both mp3 files and large sized HD movie files. I mirror my drives automatically to this one just once every month as a backup plan so it spends a lot of time just idling which makes its energy savings an attractive feature (and also a perfect capacity size.) So what does the âGreenâ part mean? According to Western Digital, the WD Green series is the company's more environmentally-friendly line of desktop drives, manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials. âGreenPower Technologyâ yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability ... MoreI was excited to receive this hard drive because I am in need of a large capacity internal drive with good power management to use as a backup device for both a 1TB and 3TB drive that Iâm using to store both mp3 files and large sized HD movie files. I mirror my drives automatically to this one just once every month as a backup plan so it spends a lot of time just idling which makes its energy savings an attractive feature (and also a perfect capacity size.) So what does the âGreenâ part mean? According to Western Digital, the WD Green series is the company's more environmentally-friendly line of desktop drives, manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials. âGreenPower Technologyâ yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics, with Best-in-class power management. Ok, great, how does that translate into real world figures? With over 100 million WD Green drives sold, customers using WD Green drives have saved the planet over 466 million kwh of power â nearly equaling the annual power production of a single coal power plant! I believe that you can use this drive as your primary drive and put your action games onto it and doing so would be just fine, and I promise you, you will not lose any frags because you are gaming off of this drive, thatâs not how games work anymore. This drive would be just fine for these things, but in all honesty, it is generally best to use an SSD for your primary operating system also containing your most frequently used applications. The performance reason for this is due to the seek times an SSD offers. Look back at the benchmarked seek times I posted above. Fast seek times make a HUGE real world performance difference. You donât need fast seek times to play back media files or make backups. You will notice however, that your boot time is much shorter and loading applications is much quicker with them. I put MS Word on my SSD and it opens a .doc file instantly. There is a noticeable lag time when opening the file while Word is on the review drive. Windows feels speedier in general off an SSD as well. Western Digital did come out with the following about this driveâs platter speeds: âOverall, this product meets the performance requirements of most applications while delivering significantly less power consumption. If your application requires mostly sequential read/writes, then the drive will perform comparable to a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if your application performs mostly random mode operations, then the performance may drop by about 10% because of the latency time.â I love honesty and it instills in me a deeper level of loyalty to this company. Overall, I have no reason to not recommend this drive for what it is intended for. Four terabytes is huge (as of the current date) and if you are in need of some good storage space, this drive fits the bill well while appeasing your inner hippie. Pair it up with a good SSD and you have a winning co
originally posted on newegg.com
Western Digital classifies their hard disk drives into categories of colors. GREEN-label drives are cool, quiet, low power and environmentally conscious. BLUE-label hard disk drives are designed for use in typical desktops. BLACK-label hard disk drives are intended for performance-oriented users and RED-label hard disk drives are intended for 24/7 use in offices and RAID/NAS environments. Using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2c to measure and compare disk performance on a clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, using an on-board SATA 6 Gb/s controller, the Western Digital Green 1TB drive averaged 157.0 MB/s reads, and 153.5 MB/s writes. Compared to the Seagate 3TB drive, which read at 187.5 MB/s with an average write speed of 186.4 MB/s. What does this mean? It means the ... MoreWestern Digital classifies their hard disk drives into categories of colors. GREEN-label drives are cool, quiet, low power and environmentally conscious. BLUE-label hard disk drives are designed for use in typical desktops. BLACK-label hard disk drives are intended for performance-oriented users and RED-label hard disk drives are intended for 24/7 use in offices and RAID/NAS environments. Using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2c to measure and compare disk performance on a clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, using an on-board SATA 6 Gb/s controller, the Western Digital Green 1TB drive averaged 157.0 MB/s reads, and 153.5 MB/s writes. Compared to the Seagate 3TB drive, which read at 187.5 MB/s with an average write speed of 186.4 MB/s. What does this mean? It means the GREEN-series drives are best used as secondary data drives, or even put into a USB enclosure. This drive would be great in a USB enclosure since speed is limited through the USB port any way, and this drive runs much cooler (averaged 80 degrees Fahrenheit throughout my tests). Considering most USB hard disk enclosures are not cooled, this would not be an issue. This drive would also be recommended if you ever wanted to build a Home Theater PC or replace an existing loud, limited space or failing hard drive in an existing HTPC. Those of us that care more about the environment than performance can certainly choose this as their only drive in any desktop PC, knowing that Western Digital GREEN-series drives are just sipping power, using less resources to power it and that more sustainable resources were used in its construction. And then there are those of us that simply want the computer to be as quiet as possible. If you want to replace an existing (working) hard disk drive with this drive, you can easily clone your old drive to your new Western Digital drive by using Western Digital's own version of Acronis TrueImage for free at http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 If you're one of these people, this drive is for you. Performance-minded users should look else where.
originally posted on newegg.com
It's not the drive's fault your hardware can't see all 4 TB. I had every problem previous posts had about not seeing all 4 TB. It took me about 6 hours of trial and error to get my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard to see all 4 TB. This is how I did it... First...my MB is BIOS, not UEFI so I know I'm not going to get this drive to be my boot drive - I'm using it for storage. If you read Microsoft Article ID: 2581408 it states to make sure you have the latest RAID controller drivers installed. I made sure my Win 7 64bit MB and OS were set to run all drives in AHCI mode. Then I made sure Intel Rapid Storage Technology software was installed. I couldn't install the latest from Intel's site because my MB didn't allow it but when I went to Gigabyte's driver site it had ... MoreIt's not the drive's fault your hardware can't see all 4 TB. I had every problem previous posts had about not seeing all 4 TB. It took me about 6 hours of trial and error to get my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard to see all 4 TB. This is how I did it... First...my MB is BIOS, not UEFI so I know I'm not going to get this drive to be my boot drive - I'm using it for storage. If you read Microsoft Article ID: 2581408 it states to make sure you have the latest RAID controller drivers installed. I made sure my Win 7 64bit MB and OS were set to run all drives in AHCI mode. Then I made sure Intel Rapid Storage Technology software was installed. I couldn't install the latest from Intel's site because my MB didn't allow it but when I went to Gigabyte's driver site it had the newest Intel RST driver that my MB would handle - rev 10.6.0.1002. I made sure AHCI and Intel RST was working by hot-swapping some existing hard drives I had on hand. Once that was done I powered down my machine and added the new WD 4TB drive (instead of hotswapping, just to be more careful). Once it booted up I ran DiskMgr and it prompted me what Partition Style I wanted for the 4 TB - I selected GPT. Win 7 now saw all 4TB (3.63tb) I then formatted it NTFS 16byte sectors - or whatever you want. Believe me when I say I tried EVERYTHING before this without success. Prior to the above process I could only see 1.67TB. One drive at a time I updated every controller driver offfered on Gigabytes driver site but without success. Even tried Gigabytes 3TB+ drive unlocker - didn't work. It wasn't until I made sure I had the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver installed for my MB then it saw all 4 TB. As someone posted previously I put the 4TB drive on the Gigabyte controller and it saw all 4TB but I didn't like the idea that my other MB SATA controller could't see it. I also new something was wrong with my Win 7 OS configuration when GParted could see all 4TB but not Win 7. I can't speak for reliability yet because I've only had it for a few days but they were not DOA. I've had good luck with WD so I feel comfortable sticking with them. I had a warranty request on a 4 year old drive I had and they replaced it without issue - good customer service.
| General | |
| Device Type | Hard drive - internal |
| Capacity | 6 TB |
| Form Factor | 3.5" x 1/3H |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
Western Digital WD Green 6TB WD60EZRX
60-day returns
I was excited to receive this hard drive because I am in need of a large capacity internal drive with good power management to use as a backup device for both a 1TB and 3TB drive that Iâm using to store both mp3 files and large sized HD movie files. I mirror my drives automatically to this one just once every month as a backup plan so it spends a lot of time just idling which makes its energy savings an attractive feature (and also a perfect capacity size.) So what does the âGreenâ part mean? According to Western Digital, the WD Green series is the company's more environmentally-friendly line of desktop drives, manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials. âGreenPower Technologyâ yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability ... MoreI was excited to receive this hard drive because I am in need of a large capacity internal drive with good power management to use as a backup device for both a 1TB and 3TB drive that Iâm using to store both mp3 files and large sized HD movie files. I mirror my drives automatically to this one just once every month as a backup plan so it spends a lot of time just idling which makes its energy savings an attractive feature (and also a perfect capacity size.) So what does the âGreenâ part mean? According to Western Digital, the WD Green series is the company's more environmentally-friendly line of desktop drives, manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials. âGreenPower Technologyâ yields lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics, with Best-in-class power management. Ok, great, how does that translate into real world figures? With over 100 million WD Green drives sold, customers using WD Green drives have saved the planet over 466 million kwh of power â nearly equaling the annual power production of a single coal power plant! I believe that you can use this drive as your primary drive and put your action games onto it and doing so would be just fine, and I promise you, you will not lose any frags because you are gaming off of this drive, thatâs not how games work anymore. This drive would be just fine for these things, but in all honesty, it is generally best to use an SSD for your primary operating system also containing your most frequently used applications. The performance reason for this is due to the seek times an SSD offers. Look back at the benchmarked seek times I posted above. Fast seek times make a HUGE real world performance difference. You donât need fast seek times to play back media files or make backups. You will notice however, that your boot time is much shorter and loading applications is much quicker with them. I put MS Word on my SSD and it opens a .doc file instantly. There is a noticeable lag time when opening the file while Word is on the review drive. Windows feels speedier in general off an SSD as well. Western Digital did come out with the following about this driveâs platter speeds: âOverall, this product meets the performance requirements of most applications while delivering significantly less power consumption. If your application requires mostly sequential read/writes, then the drive will perform comparable to a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if your application performs mostly random mode operations, then the performance may drop by about 10% because of the latency time.â I love honesty and it instills in me a deeper level of loyalty to this company. Overall, I have no reason to not recommend this drive for what it is intended for. Four terabytes is huge (as of the current date) and if you are in need of some good storage space, this drive fits the bill well while appeasing your inner hippie. Pair it up with a good SSD and you have a winning co
Western Digital classifies their hard disk drives into categories of colors. GREEN-label drives are cool, quiet, low power and environmentally conscious. BLUE-label hard disk drives are designed for use in typical desktops. BLACK-label hard disk drives are intended for performance-oriented users and RED-label hard disk drives are intended for 24/7 use in offices and RAID/NAS environments. Using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2c to measure and compare disk performance on a clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, using an on-board SATA 6 Gb/s controller, the Western Digital Green 1TB drive averaged 157.0 MB/s reads, and 153.5 MB/s writes. Compared to the Seagate 3TB drive, which read at 187.5 MB/s with an average write speed of 186.4 MB/s. What does this mean? It means the ... MoreWestern Digital classifies their hard disk drives into categories of colors. GREEN-label drives are cool, quiet, low power and environmentally conscious. BLUE-label hard disk drives are designed for use in typical desktops. BLACK-label hard disk drives are intended for performance-oriented users and RED-label hard disk drives are intended for 24/7 use in offices and RAID/NAS environments. Using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2c to measure and compare disk performance on a clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, using an on-board SATA 6 Gb/s controller, the Western Digital Green 1TB drive averaged 157.0 MB/s reads, and 153.5 MB/s writes. Compared to the Seagate 3TB drive, which read at 187.5 MB/s with an average write speed of 186.4 MB/s. What does this mean? It means the GREEN-series drives are best used as secondary data drives, or even put into a USB enclosure. This drive would be great in a USB enclosure since speed is limited through the USB port any way, and this drive runs much cooler (averaged 80 degrees Fahrenheit throughout my tests). Considering most USB hard disk enclosures are not cooled, this would not be an issue. This drive would also be recommended if you ever wanted to build a Home Theater PC or replace an existing loud, limited space or failing hard drive in an existing HTPC. Those of us that care more about the environment than performance can certainly choose this as their only drive in any desktop PC, knowing that Western Digital GREEN-series drives are just sipping power, using less resources to power it and that more sustainable resources were used in its construction. And then there are those of us that simply want the computer to be as quiet as possible. If you want to replace an existing (working) hard disk drive with this drive, you can easily clone your old drive to your new Western Digital drive by using Western Digital's own version of Acronis TrueImage for free at http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 If you're one of these people, this drive is for you. Performance-minded users should look else where.
It's not the drive's fault your hardware can't see all 4 TB. I had every problem previous posts had about not seeing all 4 TB. It took me about 6 hours of trial and error to get my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard to see all 4 TB. This is how I did it... First...my MB is BIOS, not UEFI so I know I'm not going to get this drive to be my boot drive - I'm using it for storage. If you read Microsoft Article ID: 2581408 it states to make sure you have the latest RAID controller drivers installed. I made sure my Win 7 64bit MB and OS were set to run all drives in AHCI mode. Then I made sure Intel Rapid Storage Technology software was installed. I couldn't install the latest from Intel's site because my MB didn't allow it but when I went to Gigabyte's driver site it had ... MoreIt's not the drive's fault your hardware can't see all 4 TB. I had every problem previous posts had about not seeing all 4 TB. It took me about 6 hours of trial and error to get my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard to see all 4 TB. This is how I did it... First...my MB is BIOS, not UEFI so I know I'm not going to get this drive to be my boot drive - I'm using it for storage. If you read Microsoft Article ID: 2581408 it states to make sure you have the latest RAID controller drivers installed. I made sure my Win 7 64bit MB and OS were set to run all drives in AHCI mode. Then I made sure Intel Rapid Storage Technology software was installed. I couldn't install the latest from Intel's site because my MB didn't allow it but when I went to Gigabyte's driver site it had the newest Intel RST driver that my MB would handle - rev 10.6.0.1002. I made sure AHCI and Intel RST was working by hot-swapping some existing hard drives I had on hand. Once that was done I powered down my machine and added the new WD 4TB drive (instead of hotswapping, just to be more careful). Once it booted up I ran DiskMgr and it prompted me what Partition Style I wanted for the 4 TB - I selected GPT. Win 7 now saw all 4TB (3.63tb) I then formatted it NTFS 16byte sectors - or whatever you want. Believe me when I say I tried EVERYTHING before this without success. Prior to the above process I could only see 1.67TB. One drive at a time I updated every controller driver offfered on Gigabytes driver site but without success. Even tried Gigabytes 3TB+ drive unlocker - didn't work. It wasn't until I made sure I had the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver installed for my MB then it saw all 4 TB. As someone posted previously I put the 4TB drive on the Gigabyte controller and it saw all 4TB but I didn't like the idea that my other MB SATA controller could't see it. I also new something was wrong with my Win 7 OS configuration when GParted could see all 4TB but not Win 7. I can't speak for reliability yet because I've only had it for a few days but they were not DOA. I've had good luck with WD so I feel comfortable sticking with them. I had a warranty request on a 4 year old drive I had and they replaced it without issue - good customer service.
Okay so I have had this drive for about a week so far, great drive, but there are a few CRUCIAL flaws it has, and everybody that wants to preserve the life of their drive MUST follow the first step. Due to IntelliPower, the drive comes defaulted with a setting in the Firmware that sets the Head Parking to 8 seconds. I don't know what WD was thinking when they did this other than to save a few watts per hour, but this can have devastating effects on the over-all health of your drive, as it will cause you to rack up Load Cycle Counts (LCCs) like crazy. To change this, you will need to create a bootable CD or USB loaded with a program called "FreeDos" Once you do that, do a search on the WD website and find a program called "wdidle3.exe" Note: WD does not officially ... MoreOkay so I have had this drive for about a week so far, great drive, but there are a few CRUCIAL flaws it has, and everybody that wants to preserve the life of their drive MUST follow the first step. Due to IntelliPower, the drive comes defaulted with a setting in the Firmware that sets the Head Parking to 8 seconds. I don't know what WD was thinking when they did this other than to save a few watts per hour, but this can have devastating effects on the over-all health of your drive, as it will cause you to rack up Load Cycle Counts (LCCs) like crazy. To change this, you will need to create a bootable CD or USB loaded with a program called "FreeDos" Once you do that, do a search on the WD website and find a program called "wdidle3.exe" Note: WD does not officially list this as a program compatible with the 4TB green drive, but there are numerous accounts on the internet of it working with them as well as it working fine with mine. Anyway, once you get wdidle3.exe on your FreeDos bootable medium, you will reboot your PC to that medium. Make sure that your drive is the ONLY DRIVE CONNECTED TO YOUR PC because the commands will work in bulk, as you cannot specify what drive you want to change the settings on. Now, once you get FreeDos loaded, you will be looking at a plain command prompt. I read somewhere that completely disabling head-parking can cause problems with the 4TB drives, so I set mine to 300 seconds (that is the max) just to avoid future complications....(but I also read that you can disable it as long as you completely cut power to your drive before you try to use it after changing the settings....try it at your own risk) But for liability reasons, we will do 300 So type this into your CMD - "wdidle3.exe /s300" Your head parking will now be set to 5 minutes, and the life of your drive will drastically increase (but you will sacrifice a little bit of energy saving, which I personally believe is a fair trade-off) One last thought, there is another setting on the drive that currently CANNOT be changed. Due to IntelliPower, your drive will automatically shut down after 15 mins of inactivity. There is a hacky fix for this (hopefully there will be an official fix in the future) but what you can do is download a program called "NoSleepHD" What it does is let you select a drive and it will write a tiny text file to it at a time interval you specify so that your drive stays awake. I set mine to 4 mins so that my head doesn't park, but you could set it to 14 mins just to keep your drive awake. Besides for all that, awesome drive, works great. I'll probably be getting a WD Red next time but thats my fault for not looking into the details of the Green Drive before I bought it. Hope this helps someone, so they don't have to spend 2 days scanning the web for answers like I did xD
I was able to plug this drive in my eSata dock and it was instantly recognized. May not seem like a big deal, but many drives from other manufactures will not work in my Thermaltake eSata until it has been initialized. On tests my access times or latency was greater than 17ms. This tells me this is more than likely a 5400~5900 rpm drive. But the good news is this does not affect perfomance. In fact, all the benchmarks I ran showed this beating my WD Black 750gb. Another reviewer stated this is not good for a system drive. I disagree. In fact, in my second test, I loaded a fresh copy of Win 7 on this drive and it seemed to perform better than the internal 7200rpm drive. My boot time was 4 seconds fasterWith this drive, I do not believe the latency times will affect ... MoreI was able to plug this drive in my eSata dock and it was instantly recognized. May not seem like a big deal, but many drives from other manufactures will not work in my Thermaltake eSata until it has been initialized. On tests my access times or latency was greater than 17ms. This tells me this is more than likely a 5400~5900 rpm drive. But the good news is this does not affect perfomance. In fact, all the benchmarks I ran showed this beating my WD Black 750gb. Another reviewer stated this is not good for a system drive. I disagree. In fact, in my second test, I loaded a fresh copy of Win 7 on this drive and it seemed to perform better than the internal 7200rpm drive. My boot time was 4 seconds fasterWith this drive, I do not believe the latency times will affect performance. Evidently WD has worked on the internal transfer rates as well as the large cache. The result is a Green drive that performs equal to or better than most 7200rpm drives. I have owned 3 WD Green drives in the past - all of them were purchased years ago and they did not last long. Time will tell if WD has worked the bugs out of this drive. Two of my last WD Green drives just disappeared abruptly and were not recognized by bios. This drive does not seem to exihibit the random flaws that I saw in earlier models of the Green drive. Early models seemed to slow down at times and randomly pause -- as if taking a break. I ran this drive for 13 hours of tests without any signs of the problems I had with the EADS and EARS models. Here are the benchmarks for the WD10EZRX and comparision of WD Black 750gb. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo ------------------------------------------------------------------- * WD10EZRX - WD Green 1.0TB Sequential Read : 132.920 MB/s Sequential Write : 125.842 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 63.250 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 114.466 MB/s Random Read 4KB : 2.449 MB/s [597.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KB : 2.414 MB/s [589.4 IOPS] ------------------------------------------------------------------- * WD7501AALS - WD Black 750GB Sequential Read : 95.340 MB/s Sequential Write : 94.737 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 49.526 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 80.581 MB/s Random Read 4KB : 1.727 MB/s [421.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB : 2.074 MB/s [506.3 IOPS] Test : 100 MB [D: 34.7% (242.5/698.6 GB)] (x3) Date : 2013/01/03 23:37:38 OS : Windows 7 SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) HD Tune: WDC WD10EZRX-00A8LB0 Benchmark Transfer Rate Minimum : 68.5 MB/sec Transfer Rate Maximum : 129.0 MB/sec Transfer Rate Average : 110.7 MB/sec Access Time : 17.2 ms Burst Rate : 105.5 MB/sec HD Tune: WDC WD7501AALS-00E8B0 Benchmark Transfer Rate Minimum : 45.8 MB/sec Transfer Rate Maximum : 91.3 MB/sec Transfer Rate Average : 75.2 MB/sec Access Time : 11.9 m
The 3TB Caviar Green SATA Internal Hard Drive from WD is an internal hard drive, designed with energy-efficiency and quiet operation in mind. It features the 3 Gb/s SATA interface and a standard 3.5" form factor for installation in desktop computers. Massive Capacity The drive delivers 3TB of storage on a single drive. 1 Reduced Power Consumption WD has reduced power consumption making it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. Cool and Quiet Drives with WD GreenPower Technology yield lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics for ultra-quiet PCs and external drives. IntelliPower A fine-tuned balance of spin ... MoreThe 3TB Caviar Green SATA Internal Hard Drive from WD is an internal hard drive, designed with energy-efficiency and quiet operation in mind. It features the 3 Gb/s SATA interface and a standard 3.5" form factor for installation in desktop computers. Massive Capacity The drive delivers 3TB of storage on a single drive. 1 Reduced Power Consumption WD has reduced power consumption making it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. Cool and Quiet Drives with WD GreenPower Technology yield lower operating temperatures for increased reliability and low acoustics for ultra-quiet PCs and external drives. IntelliPower A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. IntelliSeek Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration. NoTouch Ramp Load Technology The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring better drive protection in transit as well as significantly less wear to the recording head and media.
Let's get this out of the way now, this is a 'Green' drive and Western Digital sell it as a secondary storage drive or a drive for applications where it is more important to have a quiet and cool drive like in an HTPC. It is by no means a performance drive and will be intrinsically slower than a performance drive as it spins between 5400rpm and 7200rpm's to keep power requirements to a minimum. I have found this drive to be extremely quiet and cool compared to a number of older generation Green drives that I am currently using as well as some current generation performance drives. Even though this drive is billed as a 'Green' drive it is much faster than the earlier generation of WD Green drives, most likely due to a higher platter density, in fact in my testing ... MoreLet's get this out of the way now, this is a 'Green' drive and Western Digital sell it as a secondary storage drive or a drive for applications where it is more important to have a quiet and cool drive like in an HTPC. It is by no means a performance drive and will be intrinsically slower than a performance drive as it spins between 5400rpm and 7200rpm's to keep power requirements to a minimum. I have found this drive to be extremely quiet and cool compared to a number of older generation Green drives that I am currently using as well as some current generation performance drives. Even though this drive is billed as a 'Green' drive it is much faster than the earlier generation of WD Green drives, most likely due to a higher platter density, in fact in my testing this drive turned out to be faster than many of my SATA 3.0gb/s 7200rpm performance drives. Testing the drive in Sandra resulted in a solid 156.84mb/s read and 154.62mb/s write speed. This is actually pretty good and as I mentioned will be as speedy as a last generation performance drive. However random access was not so good at 17.52ms. I also tested with Crystal Disk Mark and noticed good sequential speeds 167mb/s and 164.1mb/s read and write, however the smaller 4k scores were 0.608mb/s and 1.916mb/s and it's the smaller 4k read and writes that matter most to running the OS and applications. Just for fun I cloned my main drive which is a 256Gb SATA 6.0gb/s SSD and ran a few tests. The WD Green drive booted in to Windows in 48 seconds and my SSD booted in to Windows in 26 seconds. It took 34 seconds to load Photoshop with the WD Green drive and only 21 seconds to load Photoshop with the SSD. This is obviously an unfair comparison so no eggs off. WD has managed to manufacture a drive that consumes less power and produces less heat and noise at the cost of performance however this drive is not that slow compared to earlier generation performance drives due to the high platter density used in this drive. Well done Western Digital. This drive is cool, quiet, needs less power to run, is fast enough to copy large files across so ideal for storage duty. I have this drive in my HTPC which is where I keep my movies and music. Recommended, and at the current price is one of the cheapest bare drives on the market. Just remember that you will need to find some screws to mount the drive and it is not recommended for the boot drive.
Interesting niche, "Green," touting environmentally conscious hard drives? No problem recommending this drive in the service it is intended ... low power storage. Online research confirms that earlier models had problems, although more recent iterations appear more reliable. Users are impressed with low noise and low operating temperatures, but remain wary of history. User comments also indicate that some people are using this drive as a bootable primary hard drive or in RAID service, ignoring WD's intended application usage and warnings. Potential buyers would do well to review description and specifications of WD drives to get a better understanding of intended applications. They are easily obtainable online: Enter WD10ZRX in your Brower to open WD's information ... MoreInteresting niche, "Green," touting environmentally conscious hard drives? No problem recommending this drive in the service it is intended ... low power storage. Online research confirms that earlier models had problems, although more recent iterations appear more reliable. Users are impressed with low noise and low operating temperatures, but remain wary of history. User comments also indicate that some people are using this drive as a bootable primary hard drive or in RAID service, ignoring WD's intended application usage and warnings. Potential buyers would do well to review description and specifications of WD drives to get a better understanding of intended applications. They are easily obtainable online: Enter WD10ZRX in your Brower to open WD's information sheet on this drive, then open the PDF specifications document and read Product Features and Applications. Want to compare Black and Green? Then do a similar search for WD1002FAEX in your Browser. A twenty dollar differential separates the two but the difference in use is very significant. Comparison of energy/noise produced in WD Black 1 TB vs WD Green 1 TB drives: Model: WD1002FAEX (Black 5yrs) WD10EZRX (Green 2yrs) Energy: Read/Write (W) 6.8 3.8 Idle 6.1 2.6 Standby/Sleep 0.7 0.6 Noise: Idle (dBA) 28 21 Seek mode 33 22 Watts (W) and average decibels (dBA) The human ear can typically distinguish musical sound between 20 - 20,000 Hertz. Noise is measured in decibels (dB). Zero (0) dB is the lower end whereas 150 dB would represent the roar of a jet engine. A quiet library or whispering is roughly 30 dB; whereas a conversation is typically 60 dB. These two drives are quiet, especially the Green drive. Adding typical ambient noise of your office or computer room makes it even more difficult to hear or distinguish either of these hard drives in operation as they disappear in the background noise. Green hard drives are more energy efficient and are literally designed for use as "secondary drives" (think quiet: medical facilities, HTPC hard drive storage, external hard drive on the top of one's desk, secondary drive in PC, etc.). These drives are also expected to see much idle, standby, and sleep time. Operating in their recommended service will help assure they meet or exceed their two year warranty period. I installed the WD Green drive in an external eSata II enclosure on my desk top and you can't hear it. It literally disappears in the background noise. It's easier to look at the blinking enclosure light to witness its' operation! With Sync Toy 2.1 (64bit) in my Win 7 system, I routinely sync critical files, pictures and data between three drives (source and two storage drives). With Sata II/III equipment, the syncing occurs almost instantaneously and the Green drive does not disappoint. I have purchased numerous hard drives over the years and WD has represented itself well. I always pay attention to manufacturer
If you are a data hoarder with multiple terabytes of duplicated storage, (mea culpa), then the âgreenâ sticker may well be attractive. This drive is going to sit in your desktop PC and consume less power and hence save you money, the more drives you have the bigger the impact on your power requirements, and ultimately your power bill. I donât think you will be buying a new rig with your power bill savings but every little helps. This class of drive is aimed squarely at the desktop data storage market rather than the RAID market. The 64 MB cache goes some way to alleviate any perceived slowness due to the reduced spin speed, the actual spin speed is not stated on the drive but it seems to average out about 5900 rpm. Certainly when comparing this drive to a 3 year old ... MoreIf you are a data hoarder with multiple terabytes of duplicated storage, (mea culpa), then the âgreenâ sticker may well be attractive. This drive is going to sit in your desktop PC and consume less power and hence save you money, the more drives you have the bigger the impact on your power requirements, and ultimately your power bill. I donât think you will be buying a new rig with your power bill savings but every little helps. This class of drive is aimed squarely at the desktop data storage market rather than the RAID market. The 64 MB cache goes some way to alleviate any perceived slowness due to the reduced spin speed, the actual spin speed is not stated on the drive but it seems to average out about 5900 rpm. Certainly when comparing this drive to a 3 year old Samsung 1TB HD103UI, a 5400 rpm drive, the WD Green was slightly faster. I also had an 18 month old 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 available for comparison and the speed of the Deskstar was better than that of the WD Green. None of these drives are exactly speed merchants but then that is not what the WD Green is designed to be, it is designed to be a cheap, (I couldnât believe what I had paid for the Samsung drive 3 years ago when compared to this, roughly three times the price), reliable and energy efficient storage device. In that respect WD have achieved this. The drive itself is very quiet, the other two brands of 1 TB drives I have, whilst not noisy, can be heard, the WD Green is almost silent. The WD Green doesnât seem to heat up as much as the other two, I had all three mounted in an identical setup and the WD Green was noticeably cooler than the other two after a couple of hours testing. As to the reliability of the drive, only time will tell, but I know through experience that when a hard drive dies it is not a happy time, and as these drives get bigger and bigger those times are potentially even less happy. When purchasing a hard drive there is always that frightened little voice in the back of your head saying, âit is going to fail when you least want it toâ. The larger the drives have become over the years the louder and more manic this voice has become. The progressive eroding of the warranty period on drives is a concern, this one has a 2 year warranty with a one year extension available for a supplementary fee. The packaging with this drive was superb, the drive itself in its anti-static bag was mounted in a couple of end caps in a rigid box which was peanutted in a larger box, little chance of transit damage there. Finally, I frequently see complaints in reviews about lack of mounting screws etc., the item is clearly labelled as âBare Driveâ, you get what it says on the box.
Put this drive in my Sans Digital 4 bay usb3/esata enclosure as a backup drive for my linux box. My enclosure is not RAIDed or NASed, JBOD is all I wanted. (FYI: Dell XPS 9000 (435T) esata port does do port multiplying) Read all over the net that: - the green drive is not good for raid or nas because of the default 8 second park default setting. - the green drive is a red drive wiht a different firmwate and colour sticker - both red & green drive shoud by hacked (or configured) to lengthen the park time (ID 193 in smartdrive terms or Load/Unload Cycle Count in human terms) to something much longer that 8.0 sec'c (like 300 sec for instance) (some turn it off but not sure if that is recomended) especially in a nas or raid config. - WD's proprietary software called ... MorePut this drive in my Sans Digital 4 bay usb3/esata enclosure as a backup drive for my linux box. My enclosure is not RAIDed or NASed, JBOD is all I wanted. (FYI: Dell XPS 9000 (435T) esata port does do port multiplying) Read all over the net that: - the green drive is not good for raid or nas because of the default 8 second park default setting. - the green drive is a red drive wiht a different firmwate and colour sticker - both red & green drive shoud by hacked (or configured) to lengthen the park time (ID 193 in smartdrive terms or Load/Unload Cycle Count in human terms) to something much longer that 8.0 sec'c (like 300 sec for instance) (some turn it off but not sure if that is recomended) especially in a nas or raid config. - WD's proprietary software called WDIDLE3.exe that runs as a DOS program can set park time to up to 800 (?) seconds. -Linux has a gnu program called idle3-tools that will do the same thing without having to boot into DOS. idle3-tools is in the Ubuntu repo. In fact I set my park time to 840 seconds with the drive in my enclusure using esata. ex. 'sudo idle3ctl -s 156 /dev/sdk' is what I used (I have a few drives!) I'm not sure if WDIDLE3.exe limits the park time or not but if I used 255 instead of 156 as my delay using idle3ctl, 3810 seconds would be the delay (2.6 days) Anyway, something to think about if you're using this drive as NAS ot RAID.
| General | |
| Device Type | Hard drive - internal |
| Capacity | 6 TB |
| Form Factor | 3.5" x 1/3H |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
