>> I have no idea what makes you so angry against "green" drives.
> I am against using any drive, at this time, in Linux, with a native
> sector size other than 512 bytes.
Again, I fail to see why you're so emotional about it. I understand you
don't recommend people buy such drives unless they know what they're
doing, because their performance is sensitive to "irrelevant" details
and is not great in any case (except maybe for streaming where the
bandwidth is perfectly good, tho).
That's OK: these drives aren't sold as speed daemons.
> The Linux partitioning tools still do not easily/properly handle these
> hybrid drives with 4096 byte per sectors that translate 512 byte
> sectors to the host.
Indeed, although it would be very easy to make them do a better job.
> B. Doesn't care about performance of any kind, and is happy with sub
> 20MB/s rates.
I don't care much about performance: I have a WD10EADS in a wl700ge, for
example (yes, that's a home router with a 266MHz MIPS cpu and 64MB of
RAM: no fan, no noise).
But I also use another WD10EADS in my desktop, where it is faster (not
by a large amount, but I did notice it, even tho I'm rather insensitive
to such issues) than the barracuda it replaced. Admittedly, these
WD10EADS don't use the 4KB blocks, so their performance is more in line
with the usual.
> I'm down on these drives due to the maniacal 8 second head park
> interval, which likely does more mechanical damage than it saves power
> in dollar terms.
There is simply no concrete evidence to back this urban legend.
Think about it: this head-park speed is not a marketing argument, which
means it is both technically and commercially trivial for WD to make the
interval longer, so would WD really be so dumb as to keep the interval
short just to screw their customers?
And same for all the laptop drive manufacturers?
> I'm down on the fact that people buy them to save power, when they
> really don't save that much power compared to other drives.
> Not enough to notice on an electric bill.
Doesn't hurt anyone, does it?
> The sector alignment issue bugs me the most. Second on the list is
> that these WD Green drives were designed to NOT be used, rather than
> used. The only way to get significant power savings is to sleep the
> drive most of the 24 hour day. BUT, all the other drives same almost
> as much power in their sleep modes.
Yes, those drives are mostly meant for use cases where they're not
spinning 24/7 (e.g. home server to store your videos, music, photos,
backups, ...). And yes, most other 3½" drives consume a comparable
amount of power when idle, but most non-green 3½" drives can't be spun
down aggressively enough without wearing out much too quickly.
> So again, where's the advantage? Some of the drives are quieter by
> 3-4 dB. If your chassis sits on the floor you won't notice much
> difference.
My desktop tower sits on the floor. And yes, I and the rest of my
family noticed the difference, despite the CPU fan and system fan
staying unchanged.
> If you have moderately loud system/CPU fans they'll drown
> out the noise generated by the drives.
Hmm... how 'bout:
"If you have a fanless silent system, even these quiet green drives
drown out the noise generated by the rest of the system".
> There's just nothing to really like about these drives, and many things to
> dislike. It's that simple.
I love them: they're exactly what I need.
Stefan
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