My earlier reference to the greens stems from a 80% failure rate due to both bad sectors and electronic failures. This includes drives used both as backup and light-duty storage (not system) drives. We sold 20 greens this year and have seen 16 of them fail.
I didnt say that they are any good tbh, i just say all you can need them for is as a backup maybe.
I had a WD Elements, and it caused massive data failures. Sometimes the drive worked proper and sometimes all my files was corrupted, i checked it using CRC32 and it was totaly unstable. Finally i had to throw the WD Elements (with some cheap noname WD green inside) away. I didnt want a replacement because i cant stand that trash and 1.5 GB was to less for me. Corrupted files, im allergic against, when i see i.. (well vomit).
Anyway, i have another 2 TB WD green, and that worked proper so far and i use it for backup in which it did a great job so far. Aswell any other WD drive usualy arnt bad at all, but the WD greens surely are mostly some questionable pieces, which are manufactured almost anywhere, usualy at the spot where it cost them nothing. However, for backup you only need a drive which is working without failure, performance isnt a matter at all.
I got a WD RE4 too, thats a great drive, very fast, the only bad thing is theyr price.
Ah yeah, i dont trust SMART datas, its just a tool which been created in order to give a customer a (sometimes wrong) proof how "reliable" a certain drive is, but SMART cant even detect half the failures. For my stuff it works best when i use a file integrity hash and then check the files manually, every time i did a transfer, and it will reveal as good as any failure, even those not detected by any SMART tool. Aswell when you use USB for the external drive be aware that there isnt any internal hash check. SATA is the most reliable interface for file transfer. You cant even detect a corruption on file size, a file can be corrupt even if it got same filesize such as the original, its a pretty complicated matter.
