WD GREEN vs WD BLACK

[kaufman37]

Im trying to finish my build and i already have 2 WD GREENS witch i got off ebay cheap $60 each i was wondering what the performance diffidence would be should i get a WD black or run the WD GREENS in Raid 0 would there be a big diffidence in performance? here my parts list


CPU: Intel Core i7 920 D0 - $340 OWNED
Motherboard: EVGA X58 SLI LE - $280 OWNED
Case: Cooler Master Haf 932 - $150 OWNED
CD/DVD DRIVE: Liteon 20X DVD Writer - $30 OWNED
HARD DRIVE : x2 Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB - $60 OWNED
CPU Cooler: Coolermaster Hyper 212 - $30 PLAN TO BUY
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 275 - $200 PLAN TO BUY
PSU: Coolermaster Silent Pro 1000W - $160 PLAN TO BUY
RAM: Patriot Extreme Performance Pgs 6GB 3X2GB DDR3-1333 CL9-9-9-24 -$150 PLAN TO BUY


Thanks Kaufman

[SugarJ]

The green drives are slower than the blues and blacks. They are meant for storage drives. Would 2 of them in RAID 0 be faster than a single 640gb Black? I don't know. I don't think I'd ever run RAID 0 HDDs as my OS partition, just because about every week or two there's a new thread on this forum asking for help recovering failed RAID partitions.

From your parts list, you are spending a fair bit of coin to build a good gamer. I'd spend the extra $75 and buy a 640 Black for an OS drive, or save up and buy a SSD.

[Silvgearx]

its pretty much noise verse performances.

the greens are dead silence, the blacks tend to have a small buzzing on idle and a lot of noise during searching/defrag

why not go for those SSD in the $150 range?

they are quiet and fast, but limit space.

[Zero82z]

Do not use RAID 0 for your OS drive(s).

Go with the Black. Like SugarJ pointed out, the Greens are meant more for data storage, whereas the Black drives are ideal for situations that are more sensitive to performance. You will benefit a lot from using a faster drive as your OS drive.

[ayah]

Definitely go with a single Black.
Raids are nice, if you really need the performance, but you need to back up often.

[YoungMan]

Between the 2, blacks are much better for OS drives. Their access times are also better, due to higher RPMs.
But honestly, SSDs are the way to go for any OS drives.

I see no reason to ever buy Greens or blues, unless you can get them for considerably cheaper. It's worth the extra $10-15 for a faster drive with +2 years warranty.
And if noise + heat is an issue, there's always great hitachi and seagate drives which outperform the green and costs less, on top of the reduced noise and heat.

(I've personally used RAID0 myself with 2 Samsung drives for a good few months. Then I switched to SSDs for performance, the array was still intact. The chance of your RAID0 falling apart is the same chance as a drive dying. If you have a history of drives dying, better not use RAID. Otherwise it's perfectly fine.)

[kaufman37]

Alright thanks for the help what i think im going to do is get a WD Black 500gb and run it in my computer as main drive and take one of my greens and run as a storage and the other green ill put in an enclosure and use for backup's

[Zero82z]

Originally Posted by YoungMan

The chance of your RAID0 falling apart is the same chance as a drive dying.

Actually, it's the chance of one out of two drives dying. Very big difference. This page shows the probability of failure for a few different types of RAID, and naturally, RAID 0 is significantly more likely to fail than any other type of drive arrangement.

[YoungMan]

Gee, thanks for that. I really didn't know that RAID0 had the highest risk of failure. Thank the heavens you came along, otherwise disasterous things would've happened. Even the apocalypse! Oh what would I have done?! My life was on the edge of ruins! Oh thank you jolly good sir! You've saved my life! My knight in shining armor!


Think of it this way. Luck set it up that you have to lose 1 drive. Now you either get to have 1 single drive or a RAID0 setup with 2 drives for your OS. BUT, you still have to lose 1, because fate hates you. Either of those options, you still lose.
That said, don't put important data on your OS drive, and you can RAID0 all you want.

[LarkStarr]

Originally Posted by YoungMan

I see no reason to ever buy Greens or blues, unless you can get them for considerably cheaper.

if you're just dumping pictures, movies, etc... files you wont constantly access, why the devil would you use anything else -but- a green? sufficient speed, low power, quiet and that $10 - $15 cheaper!


but +1 to getting a black or some other high performance drive in that rig.