Anyone using Western Digital WD10EACS 1TB Internal HDD?

[srothwell]

Just curious if anyone is using the Western Digital WD10EACS 1TB internal drive with Sage.

The reason I ask is this drive's claim to fame is it can reduce its RPM to 5400 if it feels like its not being used and will park its heads more often than a "regular" drive. Also claims to save a whopping 5 watts of electricity.

I'm just curious if the lower RPM will cause any issues recording HD with Sage.

The drive is also cheap..... about $270 at Newegg.

[davephan]

Can the power saving feature be turned off?

Dave

[srothwell]

Originally Posted by davephan

Can the power saving feature be turned off?

Dave

No, it's just the way the drive is made.

However, I've seen several people say they've replaced their Tivo's drive with it.

[Djc208]

Anandtech did a review/comparison here. The short of it is the drive runs cool, is quiet, and does use less power than a standard drive (even if only slightly), but it's performance leaves something to be desired compared to the competition. You can see some of the other drives in this class too.

[srothwell]

Nice article. thanks.

I get the impression from it, though, that the WD drive would probably be just fine for HTPC applications.

Let's figure that right now, I have 2 HD tuners and 2 Analog tuners. The HD tuners can have a maximum of 19Mb/s (but usually are around 15) each and I have the analog tuners at about 6Mb/s.

By my calculations, the HDD would need to have a sustained transfer rate of 50Mb/s to record. Now let's say that I want to watch HD on 4 TVs at a time...... so I need to add 51Mb/s to that.

That brings the drive to right around 100Mb/s. The drive has a 1100Mb/s sustained transfer rate.

Maybe I'll give it a try when my Lacie External drive fails FOR THE THIRD TIME :-(

Stacy

[malbec]

Just bought one Monday from Newegg.com ($220 and used paypal to save another 20%). Arrived today. After I get installed and use it for a bit (assuming I remember ) I will post back. Problem will be, however, my system won't put as much load on it as you speced out for testing...

[malbec]

Well, the drive is certainly not a rocket. Maybe I need to get used to formatting a 1 TB drive, but 16 hours to do it seems rather excessive. Nonetheless, I am now up and running. The drive is very, very quite and I have had no problems at all with it. As for trying to tax it, the best I was able to do is using 2 MVPs to access it at the same time while recording a show with the HD Homerun as well as recording another with a PVR-150 (comskip running on the recordings). If performance becomes an issue, I think 3 of them in a RAID 5 setup would probably address the concerns.

[stanger89]

This might put some things in perspective:
http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C2

The EACS is capable of almost 80MB/sec reads (42MB/sec minimum)

Of course this is probably more directly indicative of a SageTV multi-"user" situation:
http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C5

Basically the EACS is right smack in the middle of it's 7200rpm competition.

[White94Cobra]

I just installed two of them into my system. I've recorded 4 HD shows while watching another and it didn't have any issues. In fact, with my 3-year old 400GB drives struggled at that same load.