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

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Fri Dec 24 18:28:37 UTC 2010


2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de>:
> On 12/24/2010 07:03 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> 2010/12/24 Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de>:
>>> the drive is a lot faster and will reach its expected lifetime, hopefully.
>>
>> Is it? In what way? Something like hdparm -tT or something else?
>
> sorry, no. sloppy wording. it reacts faster to intermittent requests,
> because the heads are already flying and don't have to be un-parked.
> throughput is of course the same.
>

Ah, certainly. Must be true if the heads aren't parked at all. Is that
what that firmware does, or does it just slow down how often it's
parked?


>> Reaching its lifetime would be a good thing.
>
>>> no. under linux, power consumption will actually go down, since the
>>> constant head parking and unparking is avoided. if you implement laptop
>>> mode with very large dirty buffers, you might actually reach a point
>>> where there's actual benefit to this "green" feature, but i have a very
>>> strong suspicion it's just a stupid greenwashing feature they came up
>>> with (without expecting much themselves), because marketing wanted it.
>>>
>>
>> I think that really depends on how long it's left asleep. At this 2
>> minute rate I'm seeing I suspect it lowers power to put it to sleep
>> but I don't know.
>
> probably. but i guess you are already using "laptop mode with longer
> sync times. i'm sure i saw it wake up and park more often, a few times
> per minute iirc.

That's what I remembered also but the number I posted in replying to
Jouni was 269117 and the Power On Hours counter currently says 7535
which is 313 days or around 10 months.

269117 / 7535 is about 35/hour or roughly 2 minutes.

I'm running Gentoo and have no recollection of making any changes or
ever finding a setting that slowed it down significantly but I admit I
didn't try very hard. I'm just doing backups and figured I'd swap in
another drive when it gets up too high.

I have a bunch of these drives never opened as I couldn't return them,
it was too late, and I never used them so far.

- Mark


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