WD Blue or Green?

[marcus24]

I'm looking for a 1TB drive just for storage purposes. I got a WD Blue last month, which started showing bad sectors and failed just after 2 weeks. Maybe it was bad luck but I'm not sure if I can trust the blue drives again.

I've also heard that the green drives are slow and have low transfer rates. So, would WD green be good for storage/backup or should I get WD Blue again?

 

[jae]

Ive been looking for a 2tb hard drive. I looked at Green line because there was a sale, and from what I saw it looked like WD reliability has fallen.

 

[Berliner]

I would go for the Green for storage, since speed will not matter.

You always will see some hard drives fail, only some more than others. So I would not distrust "Blue" over "Green", just because one Blue failed you. Also, did you not get a replacement from the dealer or manufacturer right away?

 

[Harvey]

I would go for the Green for storage, since speed will not matter.

You always will see some hard drives fail, only some more than others. So I would not distrust "Blue" over "Green", just because one Blue failed on you.

Search Google for WD green drive with words like, "failure rate" "reliability," or "problems." They appear to have a higher failure rate than conventional drives that are otherwise of the same quality. I'll gladly spend the extra power to get more reliable drive.

Also, did you not get a replacement from the dealer or manufacturer right away?

I prefer WD and Seagate drives because they're both top tier manufacturers. Over the years, I've installed them in my own and my friends' machines. I've encountered occasional failures, but both companies have been extremely good about replacements for drives under warranty.

Another plus is that both companies offer free copies of branded versions of Acronis True Image, which allows you to clone the drive. The only restriction on these versions is that at least one drive in the chain (source or target) must be from the company providing the software.

The real bottom line is that any drive is just a machine that CAN fail. ALWAYS back up your data, and if you can afford a second drive, clone your running drive regularly.

For desktops, I like to mount a second drive in a mobile rack so I can unplug it when not in use. There is no virus that can jump the air gap between the machine and an unplugged drive. If your running drive fails, the cloned drive plugs in and runs without having to reinstall your OS and all of your programs. If your running drive becomes hopelessly infected, you can boot to the colone drvie and clone back to the the main drive.

If your running drive is a laptop, you can backup to an external drive. To restore or install the running system on a new drive, start from a recovery CD and clone the image file to the laptop drive without having to reinstall your OS and all of your programs.

Even if your running drive fails or becomes hopelessly infected, once you have a new clone, you may be able to connect the failed/infected drive as a slave, disinfect it (if infected) and try to read and recover any files not on the cloned backup.

 

[nickbits]

My guess it was damaged in shipping. Where did you get it from? I would get another blue.

 

[nightspydk]

Harvey is right but often it comes down to experience. Seagate had a bad batch and so did most. WD have trouble still imo.

Prefereces and do backup yep.

My cents.

Acronis might have run it's course tho unfortunately and do not ever count on a clone drive like that imo.

 

[Revolution 11]

I'm looking for a 1TB drive just for storage purposes. I got a WD Blue last month, which started showing bad sectors and failed just after 2 weeks. Maybe it was bad luck but I'm not sure if I can trust the blue drives again.

I've also heard that the green drives are slow and have low transfer rates. So, would WD green be good for storage/backup or should I get WD Blue again?

Have you considered Seagate's Barracuda drives? I got a 2TB drive for around the same price as a WD Green 2TB but the Seagate has 7200 RPM vs the Green's 5400 RPM.

There should be plenty of hard drive deals around this time. And a single drive failure does not indicate anything about the hard drive company or line of products.

Acronis might have run it's course tho unfortunately and do not ever count on a clone drive like that imo.

Why do you consider Acronis inferior now? Is the current version worse than the 2010 Acronis?

 

[nightspydk]

I always loved acronis everything tho unfortunately points to acronis beeing lacking, but like I have said before, I think it might have to do with the number of drives we use now and the interfaces. A bit like what happened with hirens. I'm not saying it inferior to symantec the time did this if you understand with SSD pci-e etc.. It is so tho if you look.

 

[jae]

Harvey is right but often it comes down to experience. Seagate had a bad batch and so did most. WD have trouble still imo.

Yes, as of now it seems like Seagate might've gotten back on track. I actually preferred WD to Seagate until recently.

 

[Berliner]

Search Google for WD green drive

I recently did because I purchased a 4 TB one and now I did again and I found mostly conflicting information whether Blue or Green was better. The forum consensus appeared to be "don't use Green in RAID", while a smaller vendor said they had more RMA cases with Blues.

I guess no one will get WD's numbers directly?

 

[Charlie98]

I have a WD 500GB Green in 24/7 video recording duty... it's been running over a year with no problems whatsoever.

I actually have a WD Red I'm troubleshooting right now for a bad sector, so go figure.

I have 2 Seagate internal HDDs that have been flawless, and 3 Seagate externals, including 1 with over 15K hours on it (but 8 unallocated sectors, which I'm troubleshooting as we speak.)

They all make good drives, they all pass a few bad ones. What you never see in reviews are the 'Bought this XYZ drive 3 years ago and it's solid!' posts... hardly anyone arbitrarily posts positive things.

 

[bononos]

I'm looking for a 1TB drive just for storage purposes. I got a WD Blue last month, which started showing bad sectors and failed just after 2 weeks. Maybe it was bad luck but I'm not sure if I can trust the blue drives again.

I've also heard that the green drives are slow and have low transfer rates. So, would WD green be good for storage/backup or should I get WD Blue again?

The blues/greens are both fine and you've just got a dud. I don't think WD is any worse than Seagate and behardware's stats show both companies are neck and neck. The greens are slower 5400rpm drives so get the blues if the price is close enough.

The greens might have more hits on google for reliability issues but that is because they have the head parking problem. It was originally set at 7s and more recently at 30s which is still a little too early. Just use a dos boot disk and download the wdidle3 utility to manually change it to 240s or so. Its only a one time thing.

 

[Coup27]

I ran 2 x 500GB Blue's and 1 TB Blue for a number of years and they were quiet, fast and reliable. I've got a 3TB Green now which makes thumping sounds when accessing data and is noticeably slower than the Blue. Shame the Blue tops out at 1TB.

 

[Charlie98]

Then there is always the argument about pre- and post-flood drives...

 

[notposting]

FWIW, I've been running Blue's as our desktop drives for quite a few years, and have a whole pile of Green drives in our server. No problems thus far.

 

[denis280]

Running with a WD black right now.all my other built have blue.with no problem.