On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Jouni Rinne <l33tmmx@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:28:50 +0100 > JÃrn Nettingsmeier <nettings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> On 12/23/2010 09:15 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: >> >> > 1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the >> > power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge >> > impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion >> > on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think. >> > >> > 2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that >> > they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem >> > under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this >> > point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main >> > system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2 >> > minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000 >> > head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec. >> > >> > 30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks. >> > >> > Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up >> > all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year. >> > >> > Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old >> > and it's approaching end-of-life? >> >> in a 24/7 machine, you must switch of the parking behaviour in the >> firmware, which is only possible with an arcane MS-DOS flash tool that >> requires a freedos image to use (luckily, it can boot off a usb stick, >> so you don't have to install a floppy). > > Where the mentioned firmware can be found? I found nothing with a quick search on the WD website. (Unfortunately I bought one of those 'Green' drives just recently) It's not the firmware that you are looking for but rather the WD application that changes the firmware that's in the drive. Good search terms are: firmware change S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 You will finds LOTS of posts on the subject. The actual software (that I know about - there may be more than one for this function so be careful) is called WDIDLE3.exe. I am not aware as to this software supporting booting from a USB stick, etc., so I've not looked into using it myself. Here is a WD10EARS drive that's been turned on 24/7 basically since last February: (10-11 months) using the command smartctl --all /dev/sda It's a desktop machine. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 131 128 021 Pre-fail Always - 6408 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 33 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 090 090 000 Old_age Always - 7535 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 32 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 11 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 111 111 000 Old_age Always - 269117 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 124 113 000 Old_age Always - 23 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 Hope this helps, Mark _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
