The 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX)

Like many other 3.5" desktop hard drives, the 6 TB Western Digital Green drive has a label on the top plate and an uncovered PCB on the underside. The label has a lot of important information, like the hard drive model, storage capacity as well as its date and place of manufacture. This particular drive was manufactured here in Thailand on the 19th of July, 2014. Interestingly, Western Digital also added a QR code so you can scan it using your smartphone to learn more about the WD Green hard disk drive.

While this is an Advanced Format drive, there is no warning on the label about using WD Align with older operating systems like Windows XP. This is because Western Digital does not expect this drive to be used with older operating systems like Windows XP. You can use this drive in Windows XP or even Windows 98, but you will be limited to the first 2.1 TB.

Connectors & Jumpers

This is a Serial ATA hard drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers.

The SATA 6 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since this Western Digital Green hard disk drive boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 175 MB/s, and a large and fast DDR2 SDRAM cache.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to your PC while it's still running.

To the left of the SATA connectors is the jumper block. However, Western Digital does not provide any jumper with their drives. This is because the jumper block should only be used in exceptional cases.

According to Western Digital, jumpering pins 1 and 2 enables Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC). Placing the jumper across pins 5 and 6 will force the drive to use the slower SATA 3Gbits/s transfer speed. This is only necessary for certain SATA controllers that do not properly implement the SATA 6 Gb/s speed negotiation.

Breather Holes

The 6 TB Western Digital Green hard disk drive does not have any clearly-marked breather holes on the top plate. The underside has a breather hole (see picture on the right) near the top of the drive. This hole must not be covered.

Breather holes allow condensation inside the hard drive to escape. They also equalize the hard drive's internal pressure with the ambient air pressure. The hard disk drive needs them to function properly, so please make sure you do not occlude these holes!

Peeking Under The PCB

Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB - to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. With the PCB out of the way, you can see a single thermal pad, instead of the usual two thermal pads we see in other Western Digital drives. Thermal pads help to transfer heat from the controllers to the hard disk drive chassis, so it's interesting to note that Western Digital no longer sees a need to help the motor controller keep cool. We will see why in a moment.

Like the 6 TB Western Digital Red, the 6 TB Western Digital Green (WD60EZRX) uses the hitherto unknown Marvell 88i1047-NDB2 controller. There is no information on this controller (other than being a subject of a patent dispute) but it should be a dual-core processor.

The 6 TB Western Digital Green drive also uses a new Western Digital PIKE motor drive controller, instead of the usual ST Microelectronics motor drive controller (WDHC8TD), which features the proprietary Smooth Drive pseudo-sinusoidal digital drive technology. There is no information on this PIKE controller either.

The 6 TB Western Digital Green has a large 64 MB DDR2 SDRAM cache, but unlike the 6 TB Western Digital Red, it uses a different SDRAM chip - the Hynix H5PS5162GFR-S6C, which is the same memory chip used in the 4 TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) and the 3 TB Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX). This is a 64 MB DDR2 SDRAM chip, with 4 memory banks and an operating speed of 800 MHz DDR. However, its slower timings of 6-6-6 makes it slightly slower than the Winbond W9751G6JB-25 chip used in the 6 TB Western Digital Red (WD60EFRX).

Like the 6 TB Western Digital Red though, the 6 TB Green ships with double the flash memory capacity of previous generation drives. Western Digital used a Winbond 25Q80BWVIG in the 6 TB Green, which has a storage capacity of 8 Mbits (1024 KB) and a continuous transfer rate of 40 MB/s.

Finally, the 6 TB Western Digital Green hard disk drive features a single shock sensor, just like the 6 TB WD Red (WD60EFRX) and the 4 TB WD Red (WD40EFRX). The lack of a second sensor, which is present in higher-end drives like the 4 TB WD Red Pro (WD4001FFSX) and the 4 TB WD Re (WD4000FYYZ), would have allowed the drive to better detect subtle shock events and dynamically adjust the flying height of the read/write heads to avoid head crashes.

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