[LAU] Special Consideration for WD Green HDDs

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 00:37 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Until now I didn't test it myself, but since several people are annoyed
> by WD's drive killer, it might be interesting for this list.
> 
> In a German Arch forum,
> https://bbs.archlinux.de/viewtopic.php?pid=300934#p300934 , I get the
> hint that there is idle3ctl -d, see the English Arch Wiki,
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Format#Special_Consideration_for_WD_Green_HDDs .

The WD support didn't reply, but the moderator of the German WD forums
replied.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Externe-Laufwerke/Sinnloses-Rauf-und-Runterfahren-der-WD-Elements/m-p/549265/highlight/false#M772

It's said, that the EU forced that external drives have to spin down.
It's said, that once they were spin down, they keep parked as long as
there's no access.

On all of my Linux the drive does spin down and up again and again, even
if no partition is mounted, only GNOME 2 or Xfce 4 is running no
application is running and I'm even not touching my computer.

So IIUC this does mean that
- Linux does touch in some kind the external drive
- or if Linux doesn't touch the drive, it's broken and I should prove
  the warranty claim

I bought the drive 2 weeks ago and it happens since the first time I
used it, with Suse 11.2 64-bit GNOME 2, Ubuntu Quantal 64-bit Xfce 4 and
an updated Arch Linux 64-bit, with kernels from 2.6.x to 3.7.x, default
kernels and rt patched kernels.

Is it a Linux bug or a broken WD drive? How can I test it? Any ideas?

Regards,
Ralf