I have hypothesized 2TB drives are more robust than 3TB. I have the 3TB ones. What capacity was yours?
Well, I've had a total of 6 WD Greens (2x 2TB drives and 4x 3TB drives.) for the last 4-5 years from back when I first started playing with redundant storage and got a 5 bay Drobo (which was dreadfully slow)
I got the two 2TB's (WD20EARS) first and had them directly in my desktop for a while mirrored. Then when I got my 5 bay Drobo I transferred them over there with the first 3 3TB greens (1x WD30EZRS and 2x WD30EZRX), which I had for a about a half a year before getting frustrated, selling it and moving to FreeNAS. When I moved to FreeNAS I picked up my 4th 3TB Green (WD30EZRX) and did a 6 drive RAIDz2. That was in 2011.
So without digging up old invoices, the 2TB WD Greens were probably mid to late 2009 vintage, the first three 3TB drives were mid 2011 vintage (right when WD was switching from WD30EZRS to WD30EZRX, which is why they are mixed) and the final 3TB Green was likely late 2011 just as I was planning my first FreeNAS build.
The drives were as follows (in order of purchase)
- 2TB WD Green (WD20EARS) -- Deceased. Removed it when firmware became corrupted. It thought it was a 1.12 petabyte drive, and slowly aggregated errors.
- 2TB WD Green (WD20EARS) -- Still alive. Serving as a large USB stick to transfer non-critical data
- 3TB WD Green (WD30EZRS) -- Still alive, but not in use. Drive has become VERY loud when spinngin, and has the "clicks of death", but it still works, just don't trust it.
- 3TB WD Green (WD30EZRX) -- Dead. Still spins up, but accumulates a lot of read and write errors.
- 3TB WD Green (WD30EZRX) -- Still used in a backup mirror with the other 3TB Green
- 3TB WD Green (WD30EZRX) -- Still used in a backup mirror with the other 3TB Green
So the 2TB's ahve seen one failure and one survivor after years of abuse. They were the oldest and most used drives though
The 3TB's, out of 4, two are still in active use, one I don't trust, and one is outright dead. Funnily enough the EZRS (the oldest one) is th eone I don't trust, and one of the EZRX:es (the newer ones) is the one that is actually dead.
So learn what you will from my experiences. Keep in mind that they are very small sample sizes though, and probably don't mean much in the grand scheme of things.