WD Green Desktop 2TB SATA 6.0 GB/s 3.5-Inch Internal Desktop Hard Drive Retail Kit

Looking through some of the previous reviews, it seems that some people don't understand the point of the Green series. It is designed for low-power and to not provide the highest possible speeds. Personally, I would not use these as a primary drive (I have an SSD, but prior, I would use the Black series), but as storage drives, they work great! I still get solid transfer rates, but it is still slower than other Black series drives on the computer (which is to be expected).I have always been a Western Digital fan. Their drives have always held up well and typically the only time I replace them is when the size of the current drive is no longer sufficient for my needs. Well, that finally happened with one of my older 1TB drives. It was on my desktop/server and was acting as my "movie" drive for all my ripped dvds and blurays. These would then be streamed to my htpc downstairs. Well, the 1TB wasn't cutting it as bluray rips are substantially bigger than dvd rips, and the drive was about full. At the time I bought this, the 4TB had just come out and the prices were still much higher than I wanted to spend (I've since bought 2x4TB drives to replace other drives).Learning the GPT partitioning tools in linux was a bit interesting, but still easy. I partitioned the drive, formatted it as ext4 and then copied all the old movies onto the new drive. Since then, the drive has been working great. There isn't much more that can be said for it.I highly recommend this for storage drives, but if you're looking for performance, check out the Black series.

Hard drive space is like closet space- you never have enough, and you fill it up faster than you think you will. This solidly-built drive is huge, but still responds very quickly. SATA III might be faster, but this was a bargain- I got a 2TB SATA II drive for about the same price the 1 TB SATA III's are going for. It was very simple to install, is very quiet, and has been running cool from the start. It's also supposed to be pretty efficient electrically, but I can't say I noticed any difference yet. WD makes some really good stuff, and this is one of their best. For those of my fellow dinosaurs looking to expand their desktop computers, this is a good choice.

I don't know exactly how much power it saves, but I can tell you the spindles do in fact spin down. I use it as a media drive in my desktop computer. When it is reading or writing the drive stays active and performs well enough to not be noticeable. Isn't that the point of a hard drive - to just be there and not be noticed one way or the other? It can play HD videos and music without skipping a beat or buffering.I do not have any programs installed to this drive. That is what my WD Black is for. OS and large, frequently used programs are installed on my SSD. Every component has a duty and this drive stores my media and plays my media well. My computer does pause for a second or two when I try to play a file after not accessing the drive for awhile - normally after a gaming session. That's caused by the spindles spinning back up and the HDD retrieving the file. I would relegate this drive to media and maybe 24/7 connected external HDD duties. It does those duties while saving electricity with an acceptable compromise.

Byte-for-byte these Greens are about the cheapest reliable drive you can get. I've bought eight of the 2TB ones in the last 2-1/2 years, all of which are in regular use. I've had only one show any problems (on a Win7 machine after a short time in use. Occasional blue screens and checkdisk bad sectors). But a year later I'm still running it as a bare-drive backup target mounted in a cradle now and it's still ticking. These aren't the speediest drives and I don't use them for system drives. They take a few seconds (up to five sometimes) to spin up from their green sleep mode, but if you can accept that (understanding that it also comes with a bit of energy savings, especially for a lot of drives), you've got a good, solid drive here. Great for backup drives. All of the ones I've bought have outlasted a couple of their competitors I've bought by Hitachi and Samsung.