Western digital, one of many manufacturers that still cling to the old storage format of a rotating disc or platters and carving in the files and folders electronically and storing it in its silicon wafer; for most of the history of the Hard-drives, it is now used in most enterprise and basic home PC systems, storing lots of bite size chunks of vital information and holding really good reference video’s to watch in (those that we get interested or motivated in some way).
For the Western Digital is know in most cases the recent Velociraptor that I clocked to do 10,000rpm in the platter and as small as the laptop Hard-drive. For the western Digital Caviar green series is an eco-friendly way to electronic storage. We now look at the WD10EADS 1TB, the 10EADS is a newer version which is the first green HHD that goes all the way to 1TB of storage. For the previous caviar green, 10EACS only goes 500GB to 750GB respectively, are an equivalent to the EADS. They differ on how many platters they have, four for the EACS and 3 platters on the EADS, to improve on the read and write speeds, plus no need for the read/write head to go over a fourth platter, and therefore using less power altogether.
The performance given in the caviar green 10WEADS is a better break through than Samsung in the HDD market (I normally think of Samsung as a DVD, Blu-ray and TV set makers, I was wrong) that they beat the budget sector from Seagate and WD, being also cooler and much faster than both of them when looking for a all-rounder HDD. But let’s see the caviar 10WEADS go in performance with other greenies. First in the Sisoftsandra hard-drive read and write performance , is not bad when comparing with power hungry HDD, but in competing with other greenies is very high, its burst rate is over 180MB/s even the average write and read is just over the 80 to 90MB/s. With the latency of the HDD, more specifically is the head of the HDD, just got under the 10.0ns, twice as fast as the 7200rpm equivalent of what I have which it takes mine 17ns, the EADS 7.8ns, at it is not a greenie.
EADS as a greenie is a spectacular HDD, with a much faster speed on read and writes plus the lower latency gives it thumbs up to performance. Also the power saving for a 7200rpm is enough to say, I am saving the world by cutting 3.2v out of my new HDD, sort of thing. Well it will not save the whales but for an additional green computer without sacrificing performance, this is the one to drool at.
I’ve heard those drive break early because they offload the head way too often?
1. Did You hear from somebody with that experience or from somebody who think so?
And what is offload of the head – as I know the heads never leaves the platters?
The offloading of the heads is an automatic feature that affects early revisions of the WD10EACS drives, not the new WD10EADS ones. WD has issued an updated firmware and utility to address the problem with the older drives.
The WD utility for the older drives is no longer available from the mfg.
I have a mirror for anyone in need of the utility. DOS only. Put it on a floppy and boot to a dos prompt.
ftp://76.17.197.241/
Has anyone had any experience (or heard of) using two of these WD10EADS in a Mirror? Are there any issues?
yes I have used dual 10EADS 1TB each in RAID operations, and I have experienced any problems with it. if you want to RAID them you have to use the Intel RAID matrix system to make a file to setup the RAID mirroring and choose the 5+0 option. but I haven’t used an AMD platofmr for any RAID operations
I’m using a coiple of these in a ReadyNas duo from NETGEAR in mirroring without any problem. Great performances, very silent and very low power consuming.
Do I need a special adapter, or cable to make the SATA drives work with the old ATA drives? Maybe a cable?
Jeff, there’s no way to attach a SATA drive to an ATA controller.
*Totally* different “beast”.
Actually, I happened to buy an adapter to my EIDE port so I can use SATA HDD. Myabe you’ll just have to do some research in your local area for such adapter. IDE to SATA adapter.
I bought two of these drives and after about a month, the hard drive failed…not a reliable hard drive. You may want to consider a different brand or model…WD Caviar GREEN (cheap stuff)
****sileNT, on December 23rd, 2008 at 5:17 am Said:
I’ve heard those drive break early because they offload the head way too often?*****
Bob, You are wrong. There are special adaptors (named AK78) available to connect SATA drive to PATA motherboard (also reversed connection is possible – but requires other adaptor AK92).
I saw even bi-directional adaptors. They are cheap Chinese ones, wut works fine for me. One of them I’m using for about two years to connect SATA HDD to old MB.
Regards