# Just ordered a WD Blue WD10EZEX 1 TB Internal Hard Drive anything to look out for?



## de.das.dude (Aug 12, 2013)

just ordered a WD Blue WD10EZEX 1 TB Internal Hard Drive, the cheapest 1tb i could find.

i just came to know about the greens spin down timer fault and how that can be fixed, so.. is there anything i need to look out on this drive?

i will be cloning my OS drive to the new drive on a partition, and the games partition from the other drive to this drive.

Is the tool from WD the best way to do it? or are there any better ways?


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

dont drop it!


they're fine. you can adjust the spin timer on the greens easily enough anyway.


personally i hate cloning drives - it ALWAYS goes wrong. just set it up as a new OS and take the time to do it right.


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## shovenose (Aug 12, 2013)

That's a great drive, used a bunch in other people's builds as well as a couple of my own.

Don't clone to it - do a fresh install.


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## de.das.dude (Aug 12, 2013)

Mussels said:


> dont drop it!
> 
> 
> they're fine. you can adjust the spin timer on the greens easily enough anyway.
> ...



but i am so lazy .... :shadedshu


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

de.das.dude said:


> but i am so lazy .... :shadedshu



it'll bite you in the ass sooner or later.


take the opportunity to dual boot and have two OS's for a while.

(oh, make sure you disconnect all other drives when you install the OS, control boot order via bios. you dont want your bootloader accidentally on a drive you're going to format/remove later)


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## de.das.dude (Aug 12, 2013)

yes. i learnt that from a fail once  i guess i will do a reinstall... damn... so much stuff to install.

hey my steam is not on the OS drive, do i need to reinstall ALL the games? what avaout the game saves, does steam cloud sync have it on a cloud server somewhere? or do i need to manually keep them?


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

de.das.dude said:


> yes. i learnt that from a fail once  i guess i will do a reinstall... damn... so much stuff to install.
> 
> hey my steam is not on the OS drive, do i need to reinstall ALL the games?



steam is portable. it should reinstall the games automatically. save games and such will be stored in %appdata% or my documents.


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## de.das.dude (Aug 12, 2013)

so i can just move my folder to the new drive? that be great!


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

de.das.dude said:


> so i can just move my folder to the new drive? that be great!



yes, but it wont move the saVe games and each game will require a one off-reinstall from the existing files (to update directX, etc. its automatic)


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## de.das.dude (Aug 12, 2013)

what do you mean by, it wont move the same games?

i was thinking of a simple cut paste.

any estimates as to how long the first format will take?


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## micropage7 (Aug 12, 2013)

Mussels said:


> dont drop it!
> 
> 
> they're fine. you can adjust the spin timer on the greens easily enough anyway.
> ...



yeah ive seen many clone drives that i dunno just not feel right
and the hard part not installing, but setting and customizing
installing just need 2 hours but setting here and there could take you one day


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## itsakjt (Aug 12, 2013)

Congrats on the purchase. After getting the drive, check its status with HD Tune/AIDA/any good SMART utility.
Also, just for the curiosity, what is the spin down timer fault? I have a WD 1 TB Green as stated in my specs but never had any problem.


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> Congrats on the purchase. After getting the drive, check its status with HD Tune/AIDA/any good SMART utility.
> Also, just for the curiosity, what is the spin down timer fault? I have a WD 1 TB Green as stated in my specs but never had any problem.



they park the heads every 8 seconds. on an OS like linux (or a 'dumb' device like a NAS) this means the devices can literally power on and off every 8 seconds, wearing them out really, really fast. 

its because they were designed for a windows external drive - they're more shock resistant when parked, and as a non-OS drive it would save power (which is the only thing making them 'green' they simply idle more)


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## itsakjt (Aug 12, 2013)

Mussels said:


> they park the heads every 8 seconds. on an OS like linux (or a 'dumb' device like a NAS) this means the devices can literally power on and off every 8 seconds, wearing them out really, really fast.
> 
> its because they were designed for a windows external drive - they're more shock resistant when parked, and as a non-OS drive it would save power (which is the only thing making them 'green' they simply idle more)



Good to know. Thanks. 

So any way I can stop that in my Green drive?


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## Melvis (Aug 12, 2013)

Look for bad sectors within the first 6 months, apart from that there a good drive.


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> Good to know. Thanks.
> 
> So any way I can stop that in my Green drive?



yes. DOS tool called WDIDLE3 lets you adjust it.


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## itsakjt (Aug 12, 2013)

Roger that.  Till now I am not facing any problem. I monitor the start/stop count with HD Tune and it is normal. Note: I use Windows only and the Green is my system drive. So should I bother now?


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> Roger that.  Till now I am not facing any problem. I monitor the start/stop count with HD Tune and it is normal. Note: I use Windows only and the Green is my system drive. So should I bother now?



its not the start stop thats measured, its 'load cycle count' (head parks)









this shows that my WD drive, in my NAS, has racked up 447,000 'load cycles'. the drive has only turned on/off 909 times (which would be when it was USB attached to my desktop and idled when i S3 slept the machine)

the maximum these drives are rated for is 300,000.


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## itsakjt (Aug 12, 2013)

Ok. This is today's status. The drive is running from 15.06.2011. Is it ok?






Thanks.


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## Frick (Aug 12, 2013)

de.das.dude said:


> what do you mean by, it wont move the same games?
> 
> i was thinking of a simple cut paste.
> 
> any estimates as to how long the first format will take?



I assume he meant save games.


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## Mussels (Aug 12, 2013)

yes i typod, meant save games.




itsakjt said:


> Ok. This is today's status. The drive is running from 15.06.2011. Is it ok?
> 
> http://img.techpowerup.org/130812/HDTune.png
> 
> Thanks.




at 106,000 that means you've already used a third of the drives live. i'd suggest fixing it. (many say set to 300s, i went for 120s for some reason)

edit to minimise thread clogging:

WD green: 647 days, 447233 LLC's. *691 per day*

3TB seagate: 47 days, 357 LLC's. 7.6 per day

so basically, WD greens will wear out at 10x the rate in some situations. woo.


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## GreiverBlade (Aug 12, 2013)

well my main rig got his 1.5tb cloned to a 120gb Vertex III a while ago ... so far so good 

i transfered all non essential data, movies, images, archives, to 2 500gb WD green to reduce the installation size to 100ish gb and reduced the partition to 120gb before cloning (defragmented and checked the partition before ofc) and i use now a WD VelociRaptor, WD1500HLFS, 10000 rpm, 150 Gb Sata II(enough i think for games and most used soft)

i used AOMEI partition assistant http://www.aomeitech.com/aomei-partition-assistant.html to clone it, i never heard of but it worked perfectly after some fidling around, i hate step by step tuto and im a self learner ... bad habit maybe, still its free for personnal use with no restriction and a bunch of usefull features.

i will maybe do a fresh install when i get my phone back up working to activate one of the Win7pro 64 i have but for now i keep my 7 home premium cloned

sidenote WD drives are good and reliable blue for day to day green for storage and black for heavy duty (mostly)


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## de.das.dude (Aug 13, 2013)

its here!


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## brandonwh64 (Aug 13, 2013)

DDD, I have an acronis live disk I can share out to you so you can clone. It works very well and my last job used it to clone all our drives


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## Deleted member 24505 (Aug 13, 2013)

Bang Tidy.

Stick it in.


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## Mussels (Aug 13, 2013)

helping him get it set up over FB.


so far its a lot faster than his old drive, and working well. HDtune showed up his old drive has a lot of reallocated sectors, which could be why its performance was erratic.


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## de.das.dude (Aug 13, 2013)

i cant make a bootable usb


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## erocker (Aug 13, 2013)

Nice, two pages to install a basic hard drive! 

DDD, why can't you make a bootable USB? Do you need instructions?


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## de.das.dude (Aug 13, 2013)

i want to use the wdidle, but i can seem to make the iso one into my pendrive...

all the tutorials fail me. imma bit of a boob when it comes to storage.

dont be grumpy erocker 
here are some pix.


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## AsRock (Aug 13, 2013)

To be honest it's never let me down and i just had to make sure one of the drives were a WD.

In fact  acronis performance has made me thinking of actually buying the software it's worked so well





brandonwh64 said:


> DDD, I have an acronis live disk I can share out to you so you can clone. It works very well and my last job used it to clone all our drives



He can just use the one of there site as long as he is using a WD drive.


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## itsakjt (Aug 13, 2013)

If you really want to keep your Windows installation intact, here's what you have to do. Install another copy of Windows in your old drive. Then disconnect the old HDD physically and connect the new one. Insert your Win 7 disk. Make a OS partition and make sure the System Reserved partition is created. Restart machine and connect the old drive again and boot the new installation with it. Copy all the files and folders from the root of the previous Windows installation to the partition you just created on your new drive(exclude System Volume Information, Page file etc(make sure protected system files are shown and hidden files are shown)). After copy is complete, shut down system and remove the old drive again. Boot with the Windows disk again and click repair your computer. After it is done, boot again with the Windows disk and click repair your computer again. Click startup repair. After repair is complete, system will reboot. Cross your fingers and watch.


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## de.das.dude (Aug 13, 2013)

i decided to reinstall OS. been more than a year anyways. would be nice.. never fully reinstalled after getting new mbo ram and stuff 

anyways, FYI,,the WD one will work, you can set partition size in the new disk too, but... if there are already partitions there, bye bye data.

it cant write to a premade partition.

the only reason i wanted to transfer the os was of steam, but steam is portable as mussled pointed out, and its working just fine!


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## Frick (Aug 13, 2013)

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool


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## GreiverBlade (Aug 13, 2013)

well i provided with a solution that worked just totaly fine for me (inclusive my steam folder even if i didnt wanted on the SSD  ) dunno ... it didnt looked or seemed complicated when i did it ... maybe  not for everyone i reckon ... ahhhh whatever


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