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

[Mark Knecht]

2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de>:
> 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).

Yeah, I've heard of that, and I suspect it works. I've not used it
myself. I felt it reasonable to let folks know what they were buying
and what the issues might be. Who knows what the issues might be with
that feature turned off? Certainly power consumption will go up. Maybe
most folks don't leave their DAWs powered up 24/7, I don't know.

Thanks for adding the info.

Cheers,
Mark