Hi, > An addition. From hdparm(8) manpage: > > -J Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout > value. This timeout controls how often the drive parks its > heads and enters a low power consumption state. The factory > default is eight (8) seconds, which is a very poor choice for > use with Linux. Leaving it at the default will result in hun‐ > dreds of thousands of head load/unload cycles in a very short > period of time. The drive mechanism is only rated for 300,000 > to 1,000,000 cycles, so leaving it at the default could result > in premature failure, not to mention the performance impact of > the drive often having to wake-up before doing routine I/O. > > WD supply a WDIDLE3.EXE DOS utility for tweaking this setting, > and you should use that program instead of hdparm if at all pos‐ > sible. The reverse-engineered implementation in hdparm is not > as complete as the original official program, even though it > does seem to work on at a least a few drives. A full power > cycle is required for any change in setting to take effect, > regardless of which program is used to tweak things. > > A setting of 30 seconds is recommended for Linux use. Permitted > values are from 8 to 12 seconds, and from 30 to 300 seconds in > 30-second increments. Specify a value of zero (0) to disable > the WD idle3 timer completely (NOT RECOMMENDED!). Thanks very much for the info. I posted to the WD community forum and didn't receive any responses, so this is much appreciated. I'd like to understand why disabling it isn't recommended (that's what I was going to do), but I'll have to just accept this for now and move on. In addition to hdparm, there's also the idle3-tools package and the idle3ctl binary. Thanks, Alex -- 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
