[LAU] Which SATA drive? Size? [Was: Re: partition table]

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 12/23/2010 09:15 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:

> 1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the
> power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge
> impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion
> on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think.
> 
> 2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that
> they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem
> under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this
> point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main
> system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2
> minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000
> head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec.
> 
> 30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks.
> 
> Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up
> all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year.
> 
> Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old
> and it's approaching end-of-life?

in a 24/7 machine, you must switch of the parking behaviour in the
firmware, which is only possible with an arcane MS-DOS flash tool that
requires a freedos image to use (luckily, it can boot off a usb stick,
so you don't have to install a floppy).