Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD15EARS
Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD15EARS
- 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
- 1.5 TB capacity holds up to 300,000 digital photos, 375,000 MP3 files, and 180 hours of HD video
- 3 year limited warranty.
- Ships in Certified Frustration-Free Packaging
WD Advanced Format technology increases media format efficiency, thus enabling larger drive capacities. WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. WD Advanced Format drives work with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP but require the use of the free WD Align software available on www.wdc.com/advformat. Available in capacities up to 2 TB, WD Caviar® Green™ SATA hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40% and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. Based on WD’s exclusive GreenPower™ technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute. As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. WD Caviar Green drives make it possible for energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. They are ideal for PCs, external storage and other devices that require lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation.
List Price: $ 122.99
Price: $ 59.99
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July 14th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Some advances for the popular Western Digital Caviar Green drives, but XP users approach with caution,
THE QUICK TAKE: The WD10EARS is a new (shipping 12-2009) version of Western Digital’s popular and successful WDxxEADS Caviar Green series of drives. It’s a very good drive, but may need more thought than usual about whether it’s the right drive for you.
The Caviar Green drives offer low power consumption, low noise and moderate operating temperatures, while still maintaining performace good enough for many applications, such as networked storage. This new WDxxEARS series uses more dense 500GB platters – so a 1TB drive has just two platters, and several drives up to 2TB are available. The new models have 64MB of cache.
ADVANCED FORMAT: There’s another change as well. WD is using this series to transition to 4KB sectors on the hard drive; they call it WD Advanced Format technology. The long-term goal is to improve the efficiency of large hard drives, but as a transitional move they still trying to accomodate the 512B sectors that Windows XP uses. So the drive emulates that, using 512B logical sectors. However, they still claim that Advanced Format provides an improvement in burst speeds.
ISSUES WITH XP: While that sounds like all good news, it turns out that many XP users need to use the WD Align software to setup the drive, which can be time consuming and create some potential issues in formatting and partitioning the drive, and in finding tools to do that.
The exception is if you are using a single partition for a clean install – then there is an option to set a jumper on the drive before installing. WD has a table which summarizes installation at their “Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility” web page – anyone buying this drive should be sure to review that page.
So less technical users may want to believe WD when they say “WD Advanced Format drives are specifically optimized for Mac and the latest Windows operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7.” This drive might not a good choice for some XP users – you’ll be fine with the tried and true EADS series.
VISTA AND WINDOWS 7: Further, cloning and partitioning tools might present issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. You can read more about the AF transition at the WD web page mentioned above in the AnandTech article, “Western Digital’s Advanced Format: The 4K Sector Transition Begins.” They note that as of 12-2009 there might not be any commercially available cloning and imaging tools that would work with these drives.
LINUX AND MAC: The Anandtech article also states that current versions of Linux and Mac OS X are not affected by issues with Advanced Format, but discussions online suggest that Linux users seem to face some complexities on how to best partition and format to avoid mis-alignment.
OTHER INFO: The WD site has a good whitepaper on Advanced Format. Tom’s Hardware has a good discussion about the earlier EADS series in an article entitled “Caviar Green, WD10EADS, And 1 TB,” with power and performance info; and some interesting points if you Google “Pros And Cons Of Going Green.”
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|July 14th, 2011 at 6:30 pm
For you EE propeller heads out there, here is some electrical data,
I have bought a LOT of the 2TB WD Caviar drives. I have had excellent results with them on my iMac. I use them primarily for data storage where fast data retrieval is not a consideration. I’m more concerned with plugging them into these USB-based drive docks when I need the data. However, I’m also interested in them from an electrical perspective, just because … well, just because I’m interested in them. Over the years I have worked my way up the ladder of hard drive storage capacities. Like many of you, I’ve been rather appalled at how hot these older models would get. I swear, you could fry an egg on some of them. I never felt comfortable with their longevity, fearing that they would most likely burn themselves up. Fortunately, none did.
When the Caviar Green product line came out (1TB was when I first took notice), I was quite intrigued at the claimed power reduction. In electronics, heat is the main enemy of components. Usually every 10 degree C rise in temperature translates into a halving of component life. The Caviar brand looked like a way to get a much more reliable drive if the power reduction numbers actually panned out.
I took one of the drives in to work where I have fancy test gear at my disposal. In particular, I have some very good Tektronix current probes that let me measure DC and AC currents. I built a little cable that let me get to the +12V and +5V lines so that I could clamp my current probes around the wires to measure current consumption. I connected the two power leads to power supplies so that I could also vary the two voltages. In this fashion, I can accurately see and measure power consumption of the drive as I exercise the drive. I get far more accurate measurements this way than you can with a simple watt-meter, which seldom let you see fractional watts.
Since I can’t (actually, don’t know how to) embed scope photos in this review, all I can do is verbally describe my observations. My tests are far from extensive, but they will give you a good idea of how much power these drives draw, and when they draw it.
* When the drive is just sitting there, doing nothing but spinning, the +12V current drain is 0.24A and the +5V drain is 0.13A. That totals 4.2 watts of power during idle. I have not measured earlier, high-power drives, but I’m willing to bet the Caviar Greens draw at most half the power of traditional hard drives. I would not be surprised if it were 1/3 the power.
* If you shut off one voltage, the other supply stops drawing all power. It’s a convenient way to power the drives on and off. I would suggest power cycling the +5V rail as the circuitry to shut off the +5V supply with a simple PFET is simpler than that for the +12V rail.
* When the drives are first powered up, +5V draws an almost constant 500-600 mA. +12V current is a ramp, starting at 200 mA and works its way up to 600 mA after about 10 seconds, when the drive is then up to speed. At this point, the +12V peak current drops down to idle spinning) current of 0.24A. It does not vary much after this, regardless of disk activity (erase, write, read, etc.). On the other hand, the +5V supply current gets busy. It’s pretty clear that the head servo is driven from the +5V supply and not the +12V supply. It’s hard to verbally describe the +5V current, but I would say the average current during head movement activity is about 400 mA. When there is no activity, the +5V current is about 0.13A. When the drive is done doing what it is doing, then it drops into the 4.2W idle power mode that I mentioned above. If you are a power supply designer, you should be aware that these DC currents I cite are averages, and that you have a “hash” of AC currents that result in the average values I list. The +5V current has a hash of about 300mA p-p, and the +12V current hash is maybe 400mA p-p.
* I have never succeeded in getting OSX to put the drives to sleep. I’ve tried all the utilities in the Mac universe (SpinDown, Cocktail), but no matter what you do, the drives never want to got to sleep, at least for me. If WD puts out a utility for the PC, they certainly offer no support for OSX. Even if you properly eject the drives from the desktop, they sit there spinning and drawing 4.2W. Hardly seems “fully green” to me.
* During the idle mode, my infrared thermometer measures a case temperature rise of 12 degrees C, which is a pretty low number. UL safety limits for human hand touch temperatures are usually between 50-55 degree C — you’ll begin to pull your hand back at that temperature range. So if the drive is 12 degrees above ambient, and you are sitting at normal room temperatures (25 degrees), then your drive temperature is only about 37 degrees (98.6 degrees F, just like a human!). This explains why people are reporting that the drive “feels pretty cool.” As these things go, they do indeed run quite cool…
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|July 14th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
WD Advanced Format 4k Sector Drives (INFORMATION ONLY),
INFORMATION ONLY! I don’t own this drive; however I did just purchase the previous Caviar Green 1.5 TB WD15EADS model.
As I was about to purchase that hard drive, I noticed the banner near the top of the page that informs you “There is a newer model of this item”
I thought, “Well, that’s awesome. Thanks Amazon!” It was in my shopping cart, but then, I decided to do some research first, just to see if it was worth a little extra money. After all, the debates about cache size (32MB to 64MB) seem to reveal it’s just a marketing gimmick and performance gains don’t really exist.
So, after some searching, I came to learn about the new Western Digital “Advanced Format”.
It seems these new Caviar Green drives (all containing EARS in the model number) are using 4k sectors rather than the standard 512b (0.5k) sectors.
This change means that these drives are NOT inherently compatible with Windows XP or earlier.
However, Western Digital has two solutions in place to allow them to work with Windows XP.
1) They include a jumper on the drive that can be set to “trick” Windows into properly aligning the partition table.
This solution is only “reliable” when using a SINGLE partition. I don’t like it.
2) They have a custom application (not pretty) that can be used to “shift” the partition and data into alignment.
This is apparently the recommended method that can also work for multiple partitions.
Clearly, you don’t see this information described anywhere on this page and since Windows XP is still in wide-spread use, I think it’s unfair not to be given this warning upfront. Also, if you use any type of hard drive imaging software, these new drives will be problematic there as well.
This information and more can be read in the article at AnandTech:
[...]
Anyway, I scored this at a neutral three stars based on lack of important information only.
And, while I love the feature, Amazon’s “new version” notice can be misleading given the vast difference between the two models.
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