western digital caviar green 1tb 64mb buffer

[tuunade98]

does anyone know if this hard drive is good for gaming my current hard drive is a seagate barrucuda 80Gb 7200.7 IDE would the caviar green do me good for gaming

 

[p_o_s_pc]

there not the fastest drive ever but far from bad. speed wise you may not notice anything but storage wise its alot better

 

[tuunade98]

well ive been stuck with this 80gb hard drive since i had this comp do u thnk from a person like me who has only used a 80gb the current one i have wud i notice alot more speed and big differences with teh caviar green when i put it in

 

[hat]

I'm about to get that same drive, well, almost... same specs except mine's 2TB. When I get it, I'll run a benchmark on it and see what I get.

 

[angelkiller]

Good is a relative term...

It isn't ideal, but it's not like you won't be able to.

So, if you have a choice, I would not get a WD Green hard drive if it will be playing games. Their 5400rpm spindle speed makes them a little slower than modern 7200rpm drives. So I would get a WD Blue or WD Black because they're faster.

That said, the WD Green will probably be faster than your 80GB IDE drive.

 

[tuunade98]

i just don't want it to be any slower then my current 80gb cause that would totally suck even tho if it would be the same speed i still wouldn't mind that

 

[tuunade98]

sorry for double post does anyone noe how much rpm this caviar green drive has

 

[95Viper]

They are 5400.

Good read here...Xbit's Terabyte Hard Disk Drives Roundup: Round Three (page 3)

 

[angelkiller]

The WD Green drive spins at 5400rpm. But because of the much larger platter density (80GB vs 333GB+) the Green drive will almost certainly be faster than an 80GB IDE drive.

 

[hat]

Yeah, the Greens are meant to be power saving, energy efficient blah blah... they spin at 5400RPM, conserves power. It's perfect for me cause it will be a storage drive. I don't need a lot of speed for storage, and the lower power/lower heat is a win.

The drive has 64MB cache though, and it's an advanced format drive. That should compensate for the slower RPM. I read in a newegg review that it's actually faster than my old 500GB 7200RPM Black drive. I'll find out how true that is when I bench it myself. If anything, I'm sure it will be faster than your oldschool 80GB IDE drive.

 

[technogeek]

hell yeah lol

 

[Batou1986]

Mine was faster than my old 150 raptor which got rma'd and i got a velocialraptor back i think they would work ok as a standard drive but they definitely don't have breakneck speed but there not bad.

 

[gonzominium]

i used two 640 gig western digital greens and they were just fine for gaming, you can trun off the power saving feature and go for more speed, just select the proper jumper, and make sure you enable write caching, or you won't use that lovely 64 megs of cache

 

[hat]

Where do you enable write caching at?

 

[95Viper]

i used two 640 gig western digital greens and they were just fine for gaming, you can trun off the power saving feature and go for more speed, just select the proper jumper, and make sure you enable write caching, or you won't use that lovely 64 megs of cache

True, but, it will still cache reads in the buffer.

Where do you enable write caching at?

If you are using RAID, then the options should be in the Raid manager(Nvidia, Ati, Intel, Rocketraid, etc.)

Or, Device Manager>Drive(drive you wish to change options)>Policies

 

[MadClown]

Id avoid green harddrives, Ive had bad experiences with them, stick with the blacks.

 

[n-ster]

the 1tb 64mb cache Black (the newer one, sata III but doesn`t make a diff sata II or III, its backwards compatible) is said to be amazing for the price

the green is dirt cheap though

 

[95Viper]

I like the blacks better, too. My green, though, hasn't missed a beat since I got it when they came out(original WD5000AACS). Not the fastest, but good for storage. The newer ones kick my greens a*s.

 

[n-ster]

there is a problem with windows XP and the newer WD drives however, you have to set the strip size to 1024 not 4096 or something

 

[95Viper]

Certain WD (and others) are using Advanced Format tech and you have to align the drive before you use it for xp; or, jumper pin 7-8.

Advanced Format Hard Drive Download Utility

Edit:
Advanced Format Technology White Paper

 

[n-ster]

yea, just wanted to point it out for whoever buys these, so they don't freak out

Thanks for the elaboration, I was too lazy

 

[hat]

Here's what my 2TB drive says:

Way faster than my old Raptor X and my previous Caviar Black 32mb, and almost as fast as my Velociraptor... I'm thinking about buying another for my system drive and selling the velociraptor lol