Tvrtko A. Ursulin wrote:
Hi all,
The subject may be a bit misleading since I haven't investigated the whole
issue under other OS-es (nor do I plan to), but this is how the story goes..
Those fancy new WD GreenPower drives seem to be heavily suffering from the
rapidly increasing head load/unload problem. And the bad thing is they don't
respond to 'hdparm -B', which would mean (I think) their power management
behaviour is solely up to their firmware.
I got one of them (WD5000AACS) recently and to my horror after less than three
days of being power on this is what I saw:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 66
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 197 197 000 Old_age Always - 10233
At this rate the disk would reach it's design limit for load/unload cycles in
around 80 days. Not good - so I implemented a lame workaround of keeping disk
busy every couple of seconds - hopefully that won't kill it sooner that
unloads would..
Yuck, how stupid!
But the solution is simple. Make sure to get a warranty of much more
than 80 days. Use RAID-1 (or backup often).
Just let those disks destroy themselves (they _are_ faulty) and
get new ones all the time. As long as they make them this stupid, you won't
have to buy new disks again. Free warranty replacements forever.
To be a bit more constructive, tell them about this strategy. Perhaps
they get
busy fixing the firmware?
Helge Hafting
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