> B-con is confused. The behavior in question - the drive powering down right away - would actually occur less frequently if I were trying to do something "high

> B-con is confused. The behavior in question - the drive powering down right away - would actually occur less frequently if I were trying to do something "high performance." I'm not confused. a) The drive will only stay on if the performance requirements are constant. But many performance use cases don't ensure that there is constant activity to the drive, so the drive may shut off. b) The Black line consistently posts better raw benchmarks than the Green line. (The last one I looked at: http://www.legitreviews.com/western-digital-2tb-caviar-green-and-black-hard-drives_1077 http://www.legitreviews.com/western-digital-2tb-caviar-green...) YMMV for your specific situation, obviously, but buys should know that the Green drives aren't oriented at performance. If they give you what you want, great, but don't buy them and then be surprised when little performance hiccups happen.