Performance of WD green drives in RAID vs. IDE drives

My server running Windows 7 is dying. I currently have a 20gb IDE drive for the OS, two ide 500gb drives striped for data, and two SATA 1tb drives striped for disk images of my other computers. The most demanding thing I use it for is streaming data to my Xbox 360 (videos on Windows Media Center), and as a PVR.

I want to upgrade it to an i3 processor, socket 1155, with 2gb of ram, then replace the IDE drives with Western Digital green drives, and put them onto a dedicated raid card. So my question is, will I see a performance hit going from IDE to a WD green drive if it's striped?

Canadian Luke

Posted 2011-07-20T00:34:13.487

Reputation: 22 162

5Without looking at numbers, I am pretty sure the slowest new SATA drive today would be faster then your old 20gb IDE drive. – Troggy – 2011-07-20T00:49:08.607

Answers

Those greens drives takes really long to spin-up on their default settings and the exact time may vary from time to time, so you may run into trouble with certain RAID setup that mistakes the delay for faulty drives.

Search "wd green raid issues" and you will get some idea.

WD does publish tools to change the automatic spin-down behaviour, but they won't be as "green".

billc.cn

Posted 2011-07-20T00:34:13.487

Reputation: 6 821

The power consumption by the drive (both in idle and load) is roughly half of the Caviar Black edition. Even if you disable the power saving features, you still only use half the power as a comparable Caviar Black drive. – Breakthrough – 2011-07-20T01:39:05.327

The spin-up time is one of the life-critical fields of a drive’s SMART data; does altering the spin-up time count against it? – Synetech – 2011-07-20T02:45:17.170

True. But they allow striping the drives and mirroring. I wasn't planning on doing a raid 10, so I should be fine :) thanks – Canadian Luke – 2011-07-20T05:42:40.460

No you won't see a performance hit, provided the drives are spinning. The green drives have firmware that spins them down when not in use, so there may be a slight delay to get them going again (in my experience, this can be as much as five seconds).

user3463

Posted 2011-07-20T00:34:13.487

Reputation:

It takes a good 30 seconds for my xbox to bootup and find my server anyways, so that should be negligible – Canadian Luke – 2011-07-20T01:14:22.160

1> The green drives have firmware that spins them down when not in use Does every time it spins down and up count in the SMART data as a start-stop? – Synetech – 2011-07-20T02:45:36.670

That I can't answer, @Synetech. – None – 2011-07-20T04:54:18.273

Many RAID controllers have issues with Green drives and they enter an error state. Check with the vendor of the RAID controller The spin down can be an issue in some cases but I believe there is a workaround to stop the spindown. The Western Digital RE series drives would be a good choice and may have better overall performance.

Info on Green drives and RAID from WD WD Help

Dave M

Posted 2011-07-20T00:34:13.487

Reputation: 12 811

Thank you for the link, it helped me understandthe limitation – Canadian Luke – 2011-07-20T05:43:11.583