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

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Jouni Rinne <l33tmmx at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:28:50 +0100
> Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de> wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> Where the mentioned firmware can be found? I found nothing with a quick search on the WD website. (Unfortunately I bought one of those 'Green' drives just recently)

It's not the firmware that you are looking for but rather the WD
application that changes the firmware that's in the drive.

Good search terms are:

firmware change S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193

You will finds LOTS of posts on the subject.

The actual software (that I know about - there may be more than one
for this function so be careful) is called WDIDLE3.exe. I am not aware
as to this software supporting booting from a USB stick, etc., so I've
not looked into using it myself.

Here is a WD10EARS drive that's been turned on 24/7 basically since
last February: (10-11 months) using the command

smartctl --all /dev/sda

It's a desktop machine.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE
UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail
Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   131   128   021    Pre-fail
Always       -       6408
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age
Always       -       33
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail
Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   090   090   000    Old_age
Always       -       7535
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age
Always       -       32
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age
Always       -       11
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   111   111   000    Old_age
Always       -       269117
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   124   113   000    Old_age
Always       -       23
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age
Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age
Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age
Offline      -       0

Hope this helps,
Mark