(cc'ing Daniel, Hi) Hello, On 03/19/2010 01:15 AM, Al Bogner wrote: > WD said to me I can send them the disk, but didn't accept, that this is a > firmware bug. > > Today I got a brandnew WD20EARS (2TB) and it is the same. After about an 1/2 > hr. I had 12 cycles with an _un_formatted disk. That would reach 1.43 years of operation hour w/ 300k limit. Maybe that's the number they are aiming for? I don't know. I haven't heard from WDC yet. > I cannot accept, that it should be a warranty issue, because this > reduces the lifetime _after_ the warranty and increases the > possibility to loose data, at least for those who don't use a raid. > > I would be happy to have a native linux utility to change this. Yeah, that will be nice but it's of very limited use. How many would look that up, install it and use it to adjust the parameter? For it to have meaningful effect, it should be applied automatically, and at that point, I'm not sure it's a good idea because I don't want to unconditionally disable power saving feature without a very good rationale. If WDC thinks < 1.5 years of uptime is good enough for those products in exchange of lowered power consumption, which I think might be acceptable for certain products considering that most people don't use their computers 24/7 and the load/unload cycle limit isn't exactly an accurate timebomb like limit. Well, then, that's the trade off WDC made and the consumers can choose accordingly. And, if that's the case, I think we can and probably should try to let people know about the particular tradeoff of those drives and if possible provide a utility to adjust that but I'm still kind of against automatically disabling it because it doesn't help solving the situation in the long run while forcing us to apply a sub-optimal workaround without knowing whether it's really necessary. Daniel, I think we really need some clarification from WDC at this point. I'm sure WDC wouldn't want Linux distros to go ahead and disable powersaving feature unconditionally, so please let us know. Thanks. -- tejun -- 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
