How many "green dots" to expect of a WD green 2TB?

[Nicki2012]

Hello people, I'm really confused recently. I remember back in the pre-1TB era, 5 green dots means your HD can be returned or at least, replaced. Now with a typical HDD goes with conventional size of at least 1TB, that standard or unwritten law was lost somewhere along the road.

So, what is the threshold of Green Dots (50ms<150ms) that I shall expect when scanning Western Digital Green 2TB using MHDD? 20? 50?

I asked no less than 10 vendors, demanding guarantees, but all of them were bent on red dots other than a sufficient amount of green dots.

So, what should I make of this?

[Nicki2012]

On my old Samsung 1TB disk i normally get 4 or 5 greens with MHDD, no more than that. It will also depend on the scan, etc ...

The colors indicate the access time needed to verify (or read/write depending of what you chose) the sector. Drive capacity shouldn't matter, in other words, on a fast 3TB drive you shouldn't have more greens just because the drive is bigger, as long as the drive is fast and the heads are working fine and the platter is not damaged.

If you have a laptop or a test drive (DON'T DO THIS IS YOU CARE WITH THE DRIVE/DATA), if you move the drive or shake the drive while scanning (DON'T DO THIS WITH DRIVES THAT YOU WANT TO KEEP AS GOOD - THIS IS FOR TESTING ONLY AND YOU WILL KILL THE DRIVE) you will see that while moving or shaking the drive you will get slower reading and sectors that normaly are fast can drop to green or even red.
Sometimes even bumping a laptop or desktop "by accident" while scanning can mark those sectors as greed because it will be more dificult (and will take more time) for the drive to read/verify that sector (in other words, for the heads to find thge exact place that they have to read while been shaken/bumped).

If you have a fast 3TB drive it shouldn't have lots of greens, of course that the more space you have more chances you have for a "slow reading" during the scann.

The same if you scann the 1TB drive 3 times.

There are smaller drives that can produce more greens, there is no rule that will say that a particular drive should have this or that amount of greens.

Idealy you would scann the drive every 2 or 3 monts and see if they increase or not. It the amount of greens increase over time then the surface is getting more damaged and it's harder to read the sectors, either because of head degradation or platter.

The secret is to check the drive when you aquire it and keep scanning it to see the diferences over time, or if you have an equal drive scan it too and compare with that.

I didn't even know that they would replace the drive just because of greens ..... Sometimes you might have trouble getting a RMA even with re-located sectors, as long as they don't trip SMART.

Regards.

Thank you for your reply. My goodness 5 greens? Any chance your HDD was manufactured by Vulcans? I haven't heard something that good literally in years! I asked an agreement with vendors to let me return a disk if 10 greens were detected and none of them would do that!

And as long as SMART are involved, no one shall be able to RMA anything. I had a seagate that went completely to a chunk of metal 5 years ago only to came back alive last year and still running. And guess what? The SMART is just fine.

Ugh! The entire business of HDD is a mess.