{"id":471,"date":"2009-10-25T23:01:33","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T03:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=471"},"modified":"2023-11-24T14:04:48","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T18:04:48","slug":"review-wd-caviar-green-1tb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/review-wd-caviar-green-1tb\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: WD Caviar Green 1TB"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1657\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/wdfCaviarGreen_SATA32.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/wdfCaviarGreen_SATA32.jpg 300w, https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/wdfCaviarGreen_SATA32-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It was probably 2 years ago when I started talking about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.ca\/search?q=terabyte+club\">terabyte club<\/a>.\u00a0 This was before 1<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Terabyte\">TB<\/a> drives were common (and cheap), the sweet spot for price\/capacity was around 250<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gigabyte\">Gb<\/a> &#8211; but four of those would net you 1TB for under $500.\u00a0 Considering I spent $2000 on my first 1Gb <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SCSI\">SCSI<\/a> drive back in 1990 &#8211; being able to get 1000X the storage for a lot less, still makes me sit back and think wow.<\/p>\n<p>I failed to properly join the terabyte club 2 years ago, I suspect that sometime in the last year or so the total sum capacity of my machines at home topped 1TB of storage &#8211; but just recently my purchase of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wdc.com\/en\/products\/products.asp?DriveID=559\">WD Caviar Green 1TB drive<\/a> ensured that I was &#8220;in the club&#8221;.\u00a0 (It also lives in my webserver, so its effectively &#8220;online&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>I had my eye on the Caviar Green series ever since I saw the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomshardware.com\/reviews\/1.5tb-hdd-caviar,2331-8.html\">Tom&#8217;s Hardware review<\/a> that showed that the Green drives had <a href=\"http:\/\/techreport.com\/articles.x\/16393\/11\">real savings in power consumption<\/a>.\u00a0 While their power use under load is closer to typical &#8211; for the most part my server is idle (but always on).\u00a0 At the larger capacities, I just don&#8217;t trust the even more power friendly laptop drives.<\/p>\n<p>I watched the <a href=\"http:\/\/redflagdeals.pricecanada.com\/p.php\/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-1TB-SATA2-WD10EADS-579400\/\">price canada page for the 1TB model<\/a> over a couple of weeks, and once the price fell below $100 I knew it was inevitable I&#8217;d buy one.\u00a0 Initially I was going to get it at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pccyber.com\/?v=product&amp;i=HD-WD10EADS\">PCCyber<\/a> for $87.99 (the price has since dropped), but karma dictated that they were out of stock the day I was going to buy one.\u00a0 I then decided to head off to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canadacomputers.com\/index.php?do=ShowProduct&amp;cmd=pd&amp;pid=020398&amp;cid=HDD.443.877\">Canada Computers<\/a> where they had it for $84.99.\u00a0 Wouldn&#8217;t you know it, when I got back from the store with my purchase in hand there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redflagdeals.com\/deals\/main.php\/alldeals\/comments\/daily_deals_western_digital_caviar_green_1tb_hard_drive_7999_free_shipping\/\">NewEgg.ca<\/a> deal for $79.99 (with free shipping).\u00a0 It seems the best local price currently is $77.77.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.intel.com\/Products\/Desktop\/Motherboards\/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D\/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D-overview.htm\">D945GCLF2D<\/a> (dual core Atom system) that is my server has only 2 SATA ports, both which are full.\u00a0 So I used the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.siliconimage.com\/products\/product.aspx?pid=28\">PCI to 4 port SATA card<\/a> I had from a previous machine to host the new drive.\u00a0 Sadly, after booting I noticed the following message(s) in the log:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Oct 24 14:47:03 lowtek kernel: [\u00a0 246.357277] BUG: soft lockup &#8211; CPU#0 stuck for 11s! [kacpid:62]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Previous to this new hardware addition, my server had been up for 172 days &#8211; so it has been very reliable.\u00a0 The other symptom of this was the kacpid process eating 100% CPU. \u00a0 It turns out this is a <a href=\"https:\/\/bugs.launchpad.net\/ubuntu\/+source\/linux\/+bug\/254326\">known bug<\/a> &#8211; and there is a work-around.\u00a0 Strange how it was the addition of the PCI card which triggered the problem for me.\u00a0 Simply disabling the System Fan Control in the BIOS remedied the problem, and the system seems solid once again.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When I had initially setup the server machine, I had added a CDRom drive.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve since learned that CDRom drives are pretty power hungry &#8211; so I removed it, and added my new 1TB volume.\u00a0 Looking at my UPS statistics both before and after show the same 9% load capacity, not bad considering the increase in storage capacity.<\/p>\n<p>Looking at sensor data we see the following:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Sys-Temp-week.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-472\" title=\"Sys Temp-week\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Sys-Temp-week.png\" alt=\"Sys Temp-week\" width=\"697\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The overall system temperature has gone down.\u00a0 To explain this we look at the fan data:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/fan1-week.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-473\" title=\"fan1-week\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/fan1-week.png\" alt=\"fan1-week\" width=\"697\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/fan2-week.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-474\" title=\"fan2-week\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/fan2-week.png\" alt=\"fan2-week\" width=\"697\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As expected, the BIOS changes have influenced fan speeds.\u00a0 One has gone up, the other down(?).\u00a0 Fan1 is a large 92mm casefan that blows down onto the mainboard, fan2 is a 40mm chipset cooler on mainboard.<\/p>\n<p>The last bit of data is hard drive temperatures:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/sdb-month.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-475\" title=\"sdb-month\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/sdb-month.png\" alt=\"sdb-month\" width=\"697\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/sdc-month.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-476\" title=\"sdc-month\" src=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/sdc-month.png\" alt=\"sdc-month\" width=\"697\" height=\"159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So what happened here?\u00a0 Simple, the addition of the PCI-&gt;SATA card has caused the numbering of the drives to change.\u00a0 Thus while a quick glance at the results may be cause for alarm, careful examination of all of the logs shows that the drives are running at exactly the same temperatures as they were before.<\/p>\n<p>In summary &#8211; this drive was inexpensive, it runs cool (24C), quiet and most importantly it is power efficient.\u00a0 In terms of reliability &#8211; we&#8217;ll have to see in a couple of years.<\/p>\n<div id=\"_mcePaste\" style=\"overflow: hidden; position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 492px; width: 1px; height: 1px;\">\n<h1>D945GCLF2D<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was probably 2 years ago when I started talking about the terabyte club.\u00a0 This was before 1TB drives were common (and cheap), the sweet spot for price\/capacity was around 250Gb &#8211; but four of those would net you 1TB for under $500.\u00a0 Considering I spent $2000 on my first 1Gb SCSI drive back in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/review-wd-caviar-green-1tb\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Review: WD Caviar Green 1TB&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2240,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions\/2240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}