Quite a sandwich!

Does each disk have a separate controller ?

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I am kinda getting 'sick' of everything green. Performance numbers aren't too exciting but well the badge says it all, so I guess ecomentalists should be happy with this thing

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Who has used these 'green' drives and what are the tangible disadvantages?

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I have one WD Caviar Green and it feels bit slow for my liking, you can simply compare specs of Caviar Green with Black and you'll know what I mean.

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I have a Caviar Green and Black (640GB Black, 2TB Green) and when I transfer a game to the green from the black loading times are seriously slow in comparission, as in L4D2 loads a good 14 seconds slower (everyone steals all the medkits before i've even loaded). Also big file transfers to and from the Green is a fair bit slower.

To be honest, I wish I had gone for a Blue.

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Also to add the cache on the Black is 64MB while I believe the Green is 32MB?

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I'm sorry, this sort of tech news just doesnt make me go wow anymore. It could have just been super-hyper advanced green plumbing, and gotten pretty much the same reaction.

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Given that hard drives are already the slowest part of any system by several order of magnitude, WHY would anyone buy a "green" drive? True, "green" drives not spin as fast as a standard drive and thus uses less energy, but the side effect is a slower drive by about 10-25%.

The difference between a green drive and a regular drive in terms of power usage is trivial:

Western Digital Green 500GB:

Read/Write: 5.4W

Idle: 2.8W

Standby: 0.4W

Western Digital Blue 500GB:

Read/Write: 8.77 W

Idle: 8.4 W

Standby: 0.97

Western Digital Black 500GB:

Read/Write: 8.3W

Idle: 7.7W

Standby: 1.0 W

A difference of maybe 5W is NOT worth a 10-25% performance penalty, especially on the SLOWEST component of your computer.

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Ahh but these green drives are brilliant as media stores. I have a samsung green drive in an external enclosure, and it is inaudible, both due to its low speed and the fact it produces very little heat, so the fan is on slow (or Off). I have a fast samsung in my PC and that thing heats up too much. Probably a BLue is about the best compromise heat/Noise/Speed... or an SSD and a big store drive. Disk drives are used in many different things Dvr's & Surveillance, plus while to you a difference of 2 or 3 watts is of no mind, when you are running 20,000 of these 24/7 the power/Heat savings add up.

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As the Guest above me mentioned: I was under the impression that Green drives are better served as secondary or even tertiary (low access) storage and not performance. The news of using less platters is welcome though, I'd like to see a new Spinpoint that was 2TB, 64mb cache @ 7200 rpm with the three platters. If such a drive was as reliable as the F3 1TB drive, it would be fantastic.

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Like a few people above me said, I don't have any problem with the performance of my WD Green 2TB, I use it as a media drive. I imagine it might suck if you tried to use it as an OS drive, but then again, its probably still faster than most <500Gb drives that most people were using as their main drive a couple years ago.

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