Western Digital: You and your Green drives suck!

Attention NAS users: Before you make the same mistake as I and trust the false advertising of Western Digital and their “green drives” think twice!!!

I was led to believe that the WD Caviar® Green™ WD10EACS is the perfect drive to install into my single-bay NAS. If you are not a storage specialist, you will not know that there is a huge difference between enterprise- or server-class harddrives and regular consumers drives.

The WD is a consumer drive which is recommended by many NAS-suppliers (and by WD itself) as the perfect drive for single- and multi-bay storage devices. I was amazed by the 1TB storage and out of sheer ignorance failed to understand what the term “load-cycle-count” means as I usually am only familiar with a mean-time-between-failure term of hours of operations. I further (wrongly) trusted that with a 3-year-warranty, this must be a reliable drive. ALL WRONG!!!

Some facts and why you should not purchase any of those drives:
– The load-cycle-count describes the number of times the drives heads park. The WD’s reliability/data-integrity is only guaranteed up to a load-cycle count of 300,000.
– Western Digital stated that the drive is only supported on Windows and Mac and not “designed” for Linux – WTF?

The above does not sound tragic enough? Well, all NAS’s run a version of Linux – problem number 1. Second, the majority of users are reporting an hourly increase of 50-100 load-cycle-counts. Thats between 1200-2400 per day which will with that type of usage reach 300,000 within 6 months. There are workarounds, where you keep the drive busy all the time or reduce the spin-down time – in my opinion the wrong approach as the drives are not designed to be in long-term operation.

In my scenario I purchased the drive 20th July 2008 and as of today I set at 348,000 LCC. Within a short 4 months without any heavy usage in the NAS I am out of warranty and face the risk of data loss – THANKS WESTERN DIGITAL – YOU COST ME R 2,000.00 (and your “3-year-limited-warranty” does not cover this either!!!!