Petre Rodan put forth on 12/23/2010 10:55 AM: > this hard drive has exceeded it's 300k load/unload maximum from the specs in only 140 days, which means it was woken up every 30s or so. not willingly. Contact WD and request a warranty replacement for the drive due to exceeding the spec'd cycle max in less than 6 months. They may not honor your request. Whether they do or not, I'd replace the drive as the mechanism obviously has too much wear on it already, and within one year of use will have well over double the spec'd cycles. If you replace it with another 20EARS, replace the firmware immediately as mentioned below to decrease the load/unload rate. (It would be nice if they offered the ability to disable the sleep mode totally, but then it wouldn't be "green" pfft). Modern drives consume so little power compared to CPUs and GPUs I can't understand the big power save quest the HD industry has embarked upon, especially with potential consequences to drive life you and others are seeing. I can understand the need WRT huge drive count enterprise near line disk arrays, but not the average desktop or server. And the EARS series drives are anything but enterprise caliber. Note the power specs for the WD20EARS: Current Requirements 12 VDC Read/Write 296 mA Idle 243 mA Standby 3 mA Sleep 3 mA 5 VDC Read/Write 503 mA Idle 172 mA Standby 160 mA Sleep 160 mA Power Dissipation Read/Write 6.00 Watts Idle 3.70 Watts Standby 0.80 Watts Sleep 0.80 Watts 6 watts maximum draw for read/write and 3.7 watts idle. Sure, the sleep mode consumes 10x less power, but when you're already at less than 4 watts idle it doesn't matter except in huge disk arrays. For comparison, your average dual core cpu today consumes an average of 20-50 watts or more. Power supplies burn more wasted juice than anything, so get a 90% efficiency PSU and disable all the power save features of your disk drives to prolong their lifespan. To replace the 20EARS firmware: From: http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Green-Caviar-High-Load-Cycle-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731/page/2 Re: Green Caviar: High Load Cycle Count after short operation time 04-08-2010 04:03 PM Sorry, but our agent didn't know that this policy was just changed. Current WDIDLE3 works with the RE and GP drives listed below. RE Drives - WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0 GP Drives - WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS WDIDLE3 http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
