A while ago I stumbled on a thread on the Linux kernel mailing list titled "Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux". It's easy to find via google, or use this link[1]. The gist is that if you look at the SMART attributes on these drives, chances are you'll see a really high Load_Cycle_Count. I do for my WD GP drives. I posted[2] on the ars technica forums a while back with the same topic. The suggestion in the last post was to use hdparm's spindown_time (-S) parameter to change the drive's behavior. I tried this, and it does in seem to keep that Load_Cycle_Count variable from increasing so quickly. But the original thread on LKML made it sound like the only way to solve the problem was with Western Digital's Windows-only "wdidle3.exe" utility. Another question is this: does that Load_Cycle_Count SMART attribute really correspond to the number of head parks that have a specified ceiling (300k for consumer drives, 600k for enterprise/RE2)? Some of the threads I've read suggest that the SMART attribute talks about "soft" head parks (moving the head away from the platters), and WD's spec is for "hard" parks (where the head actually comes to rest, as in power down). Here's another interesting thread on the topic on silentpcreview[3]. Anyway, I haven't been able to find a conclusive answer to this on the web. Just wondering if anyone on the list has any more info. Thanks, Matt [1] http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/browse_thread/thread/505ccf760023d132/7e4f4e996f911efd [2] http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/m/481009715931?r=481009715931 [3] http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51401 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
