Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a software engineer and I have enormous archives of data. I currently have more than fifty drives on the shelf behind me, totaling about 20 terabytes of data. For the last two years, I've used almost exclusively the Western Digital Green drives. Perhaps a half dozen each of the 750gb, 1tb, 1.5tb drives. They've been fantastic for data storage. When the 2tb version reached the right price point, I ordered a couple of those. I was aware of the issues with sector size, detection, and formatting in Windows, but I use Solaris, Linux, and OSX almost exclusively. These drives were being used in OSX, which does have support for these drives. However, when I plugged both drives in, I had a hell of a time formatting them through the Disk Utility and had to do it manually on the command line. The real problems began after the drives were formatted and I had moved a ton of data to them. On one of the drives, I renamed a folder which contained about 1.25tb of data. Instantly, the folder disappeared and the drive appeared empty. That's right. I renamed the folder all my data was in and that magically deleted all my content. Upon closer inspection, the data was still there - it just didn't appear in the file system. Thankfully, I was able to recover the data with some command-line-fu. I then reformatted the drive and gave it a torture test until the time I had to get these back in the box to return to Amazon before the refund period expired. I found boh of the drives to be questionable, but the one drive above to be particularly bad. It could have been just a bad drive or it could be a consistent problem across all of the 2tb WD Greens. My test sample (two drives) isn't adequate to extrapolate. I will say that the experience was enough to drive me away from the 2tb version. I've instead gone back to buying the 1.5tb WD Greens and replaced both 2tb drives with three of those. I don't believe the EARS vs EADS version has anything to do with it as I've been using the 1.5tb versions for a long time now and that includes both EARS and EADS drives. They have been stable and I have never had any issues with them. I've had good experiences until recently with Western Digital's drives, but I'm too gun-shy from the latest experience to try their 2tb drives again any time soon. Back to the trusty 1.5tbs. Update: I wrote this review the first week of June and as of the second week of August, I have been running a few 2tb WD EARS drives exclusively in a pair of Drobos (as I mention in further replies to this review, the company behind Drobo sell exclusively WD green drives to meet thermal and power needs for their devices). I've had four 2tb WD EARS running in a single Drobo for more than a month now without any of the problems that I experienced on the other 2TB WD EARS that I used. I'm not sure if this is due to how the Drobo interfaces with and utilizes the drives (and compensates for the slow response times, perhaps?) or if there has been some improvement in newer productions of the drive, or if some of us just had a bad batch (the newest drives were purchased from another leading online tech retailer. Think chicken reproduction...). At any rate, I am not sure I'll trust these drives directly in a system or as attached storage other than part of a dedicated Drobo-type system. They may be fine for that use (as I've said before, I can only comment on my personal experiences and observed experiences of other people with this drive), but I'm not willing to risk it since we're talking about large amounts of data. My continued advice based on my latest experiences are that you should still consider these drives, but ONLY if you are aware of and willing ot accept the possibility that you may have to deal with returning/exchanging/replacing your drives. As always, Amazon treats customers very well when they have problems with products -- so as long as you can take the time and effort to do that if you encounter severe drive issues with these, then perhaps the nice price on these will be worth it.