On Thursday 2008-04-10 17:01, Christian Pernegger wrote: > >> Those fancy new WD GreenPower drives seem to be heavily suffering from the >> rapidly increasing head load/unload problem. [...] I got one of them >> (WD5000AACS) recently and to my horror [...] > >> [...] With it the unload feature can be either disabled or timer set from >> 100ms to 25.5 seconds. But obviously I can't try it... > >Why? Using a DOS boot disk once would not be that bad as a workaround, >would it? This DOS nonsense does not work anywhere outside x86. I see people put *lots* of afterthought in their utilities, hardware even. WD is not the first to do this unload nonsense, I've noticed it with Toshiba before: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/11/15/413 Since then, I am dependent on the thkd[1] module and no hdparm is going to fix it; the module does a dumb read every now and then on one device, causing streaming performance to kink periodically, but it works at least at keeping the disk alive. (Reason it's in kernel: better to have even when userspace is not running.) Improvements welcome. [1] ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-jengelh/rawkernel/ somewhere in there since recently. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
