4 ms·

I am with you; i have a 1.5TB WD green as my main non-ssd storage medium, and it performs great. I put everything on there, movies, music, photos, Virtual Machi

I am with you; i have a 1.5TB WD green as my main non-ssd storage medium, and it performs great. I put everything on there, movies, music, photos, Virtual Machines, etc, and I've never had any kind of (overly) noticeable performance problems.

baddox 13y ago
This comment thread is almost entirely FUD.
georgemcbay 13y ago
Thirded. My media server is 6 terabytes worth of WD Green drives and they don't exhibit the issue described with stops and starts and I've never done anything to shut the "intelligent parking" off. I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself.
- justin66 13y ago
  > I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself. On a Windows 7 machine with lots of RAM and a 3TB WD Green secondary drive, Foobar 2000 music playback and VLC video playback both exhibit the problem behavior. I don't think whatever read-ahead caching those programs do is designed to accommodate the latency involved in getting the drive going again. Also, consider how a random playlist of thousands of songs works - reading all the songs into RAM isn't really an option. Foobar 2000 definitely does some read-ahead caching, I've noticed that a few seconds of music will sometimes play at the beginning of a song and then pause, as the software blocks waiting for the disk to get going.
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    I believe you, I just haven't run into this myself and I guess it is correct that YMMV depending upon setup then. All of my WD Green drives are sitting in a Linux server and exposed as samba shares to various computers (including some running Windows 7) and HTPC devices. My guess would be that this setup results in greedier read-ahead caching by the local OS because of the relative slowness and unreliability of accessing blocks via a network-share file versus what the OS considers to be a local file.
    - nl 13y ago
      There's probably network layer (ie Samba) caching which would help in this situation, too.

baddox 13y ago

This comment thread is almost entirely FUD.

georgemcbay 13y ago

Thirded. My media server is 6 terabytes worth of WD Green drives and they don't exhibit the issue described with stops and starts and I've never done anything to shut the "intelligent parking" off. I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself.

justin66 13y ago
> I guess YMMV depending upon exact OS and software used to access the device, but most media playback software will run a big enough local cache that it is requesting chunks of data long before it absolutely requires them for playback to work without a hitch, giving the drive more than enough time to wake up if it has parked itself. On a Windows 7 machine with lots of RAM and a 3TB WD Green secondary drive, Foobar 2000 music playback and VLC video playback both exhibit the problem behavior. I don't think whatever read-ahead caching those programs do is designed to accommodate the latency involved in getting the drive going again. Also, consider how a random playlist of thousands of songs works - reading all the songs into RAM isn't really an option. Foobar 2000 definitely does some read-ahead caching, I've noticed that a few seconds of music will sometimes play at the beginning of a song and then pause, as the software blocks waiting for the disk to get going.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I believe you, I just haven't run into this myself and I guess it is correct that YMMV depending upon setup then. All of my WD Green drives are sitting in a Linux server and exposed as samba shares to various computers (including some running Windows 7) and HTPC devices. My guess would be that this setup results in greedier read-ahead caching by the local OS because of the relative slowness and unreliability of accessing blocks via a network-share file versus what the OS considers to be a local file.
  - nl 13y ago
    There's probably network layer (ie Samba) caching which would help in this situation, too.