Apparently new WD Blues (WDx0EZRZ) are now 5400rpm and replace WD Greens (WDx0EZRX), from what I can see they are the same as the greens, I’m getting a 4TB tomorrow, anyone using them? Do they need wdidle3 to disable head parking?

Yeah those Green/Blue/Red are kinda confusing. Green used to be labeled IntelliPower.

 

Green on NewEgg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136874&cm_re=wd_green-_-22-136-874-_-Product

 

Points to

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235012

 

Still looks like you can buy the greens up to 6TB, but I'm wondering if they are phasing them out or what is their plan?

 

Also when I said confusing between the 3 from this Article.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Green-vs-Red-Hard-Drives-602/

 

They are saying the Red and the Green are very similar, yet it appears the Blue is very simular. So good grief lol

And here I thought the colors was only to match my interior design 

Personally and I do mean personally I'm going to be swapping out my Greens for Reds because of the TLER in the Reds and the longer warranty.

I have used both reds and greens and really have seen no difference, in my NAS (not unraid server) I have it full of reds but have had a few fail on me and have replaced them under warranty. The reds offer an extra year of warranty, 3 versus 2 and the red pro's offer 5 but are much more expensive than the regular reds. The blues used to be their entry level drive and used to not be available beyond 1TB but that does seem to be changing and I too have heard rumours that the blue line will be replacing the green.

I was expecting the disk tomorrow but arrived today, it looks exactly the same as the 4tb green with a blue sticker, starting speed is also same ~150MB/s.

 

Comes with idle timer set to 8sec., wdidle3 still works to disable it.

 

Also I couldn’t find any more greens, only blues are available.

 

 

I buy NAS drives primarily for the longer warranty too.  If greens/blues/oranges/lilacs had longer warranties for a reasonable price I would buy those instead.

In my experience most disks malfunction in the first weeks, or after 5 or 6 years, and in my country the Red costs 30% more, so I usually by Greens, which I now confirmed are being phased out for the new Blues.

 

   

WD is making it easier for its customers to choose the correct drive for their desktop and laptop. Over the next several months, WD Green 5400 RPM-class 3.5-inch hard drives (with up to 6TB capacity) will be merging with WD Blue 7200 RPM-class 3.5-inch hard drives (with up to 1 TB capacity) to be collectively sold under the WD Blue brand. Product availability is dependent upon each retailer. Please see the model specifications above for more information on the expanded lineup.

 

 

How this is easier for consumers I don’t get, before Greens were 5400rpm and Blues 7200rpm, now Blue can be either.

 

Personally and I do mean personally I'm going to be swapping out my Greens for Reds because of the TLER in the Reds and the longer warranty.

 

TLER is an issue for RAID disks but not unRaid disks.

 

For those not familiar, a RAID controller is expecting a drive to report either success or failure within a certain period of time. If it doesn't, it assumes the disk has failed and disables it. Non-TLER drives can take longer to respond in certain situations, often because they are trying to do MORE to access the data (e.g., retrying). So non-TLER drives have a better chance of accessing the data in challenging situations than TLER. But RAID is all about speed, and hold drives responsible for speaking up quickly to maintain high performance. The theory is they'd rather kick the disk and replace / rebuild it than allow a disk to degrade performance.

 

Again, unRaid does not require drives meet the strict timing requirement of RAID drives and will not kick drives for this reason.

 

NAS rated drives are typically TLER rated. Doesn't mean necessarily the drive themselves are any different or better. But the firmware is different.

bjp999

 

Good Catch on that TLER. Not sure why I didn't even realize that. 

I run 4x WD40EZRZ Blues. 

 

I didn't run wdidle on them, and they aren't doing any unnecessary head parking.  Mine have about 1200 hours on them, and all have less than 90 load cycles.  They head park WAY less than my Reds which are well in to the hundreds/thousands of load cycles in 2000 hours (both 5TB and 3TB Red).