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These drives are slow, and their firmware is defective. I could not use these disks as startup disks on my Mac Pro. My recommendation: Stay away from Western Digital disk drives!
Rating: 1 / 5

Try this link and the discussion that follows … (…) Seems Amazon removed my link… Makes this a more like a high performance 5200rpm drive, enhanced speed only because of increased density on the platters. I had to give a rating to give a review… I gave it a 5 for what it is attempting to do, but a 2 for not explaining on it’s website what it is attempting to do and not giving rotational speeds.
Rating: 3 / 5

Update: Did get past the boot problem. But, these drives randomly “funk out” with transfer speeds dropping so dramatically the system is barely usable. No hard/soft reports in SMART, nothing from the OS (both in and out of the software raid). Even when they’re not “funking”, they’re hardly performance stars. Anyway, had to return them and come up with Plan B.

So, bought a Hitachi 7k2000 to try. Oh my, pay dirt. Not only did it “just work” but as my raid array is rebuilding right now the performance is exceptional. Usually the write target of an array rebuild sits solidly at the top of the IO busy list, not so the Hitachi. In sequential reads, the Seagate’s are being noted as 50-70% busy reading 2800-3500 IOs/10sec. The WD15EARS best performance, ever, max’ed at 2200 IOs/10sec read, while the Hitachi is reporting only 31% busy at 3500 WRITEs/10 sec (atop). Drive LED’s confirm, Seagate ST31500341AS drives are lit up, while the Hitachi’s is clearly FAR less active.

Temps (After 6 hrs writing). In toaster: Seagate 99F, Hitachi 95F. In case: both 82F. (SMART data)

Sound: Spin sound same as Seagate’s. WD’s are quieter. Hitachi is just a bit more noisy than Seagate when seeking heavily (booting), I can hear a difference in the toaster (unenclosed bare drive, 2′ away) but not in the case.

Other: All 7 of the Seagate’s are reporting millions of SMART correctable “Read Errors”. 10’s of thousands a day, everyday, from the first power up array rebuild. Hitachi rebuild just finished, reported ‘1′. (SMART data) WD doesn’t report this data, guess if you have to ask you don’t want to know.

Having spent far more time studying hard drives than I ever wanted/needed to, Ihave a theory these 500G platters are just slightly beyond what current drive mechanics can accurately track. WD decided to go with slow and careful, and has recently started using a secondary positioning actuator on their heads to get back to normal speeds. Meanwhile Seagate decided to lean on ECC to pull them through. Problem with the ECC route is it was created to handle day-to-day events like micro vibrations and small shocks. When you lean on it as a routine, you lose the purpose for which it was intended, thus Seagate’s seeming inability to maintain a stable drive.

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I purchased 7 of the WD15EARSdrives to replace my problematic Seagate units. When I put the first on into my machine, if failed to boot. Opened another, same issue. Boot process stops, and motherboard (EVGA Classified) reports error code ‘8d’.

Contacted EVGA support. Turns out some controllers cannot handle drives with different speeds on them at the same time. One of the three controllers on the board seems to work (Intel’s ICH9 chipset) but the other two (Jmicron) will not.

Also, transfer speed to the media seems consistent with a fixed 5400 rpm when compared to a 7200 rpm drive. Rumor on the net suggests these will speed up when demand dictates, 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm. I’ve seen no hint of any speed up. The drive always transfers more slowly than the 7200 and consistently at a 5400/7200 ratio one might expect from a fixed 5400 rpm drive. WD is utterly silent on spindle speeds on their green drives, so maybe the ‘net rumors are inaccurate.

Also, their new “advance formatting” can get you into trouble. The drive does physical I/O in 4K units to the media, but acts to the OS like it’s handling standard 512 byte blocks. If your OS unknowingly mis-aligns its file system blocksize to cross one, or more, of these physical blocks the drive’s performance will tank.

Otherwise these may be fine drives but, as usual, pushing the technology envelope has its drawbacks. Some technical savvy is a good thing when using these drives, and I may have a somewhat compicated plan that may salvage them in my setup. I gave one star because I should have been given some clue that I might have to “work at these” in the first place. But, then again, if I knew, I would not have bought them and that’s probably not in WD’s business plan.

If I do get these WD’s to work, I sure hope they’re reliable. I’m going through all this because Seagate is now at 5 failed/failing drives out of 8 in less than a year, and even raid 6 can’t safely cope with that sort of trash reliability. No matter how “easy” Seagate’s wty service, I can’t safely have them failing that quickly. (I have 3 failing Seagate’s in the array right now, enough to wipe it out.)

Rating: 1 / 5