[LAU] Special Consideration for WD Green HDDs

[John Murphy]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:20:35 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> From: linux-audio-user-bounces at lists.linuxaudio.org on behalf of John Murphy
>
> > Does it spin down and up again if you stay in your BIOS configuration,
> > or Grub prompt?
> 
> Thank you John :) that's a very good idea. I'll test it right now.
> 
> FWIW for
> 
> spinymouse at avlinux:~$ uname -a
> Linux avlinux 3.0.23-avl-7-pae #28 SMP PREEMPT Thu Mar 1 19:14:14 EST 2012 i686 GNU/Linux
> spinymouse at avlinux:~$ cat /etc/issue
> Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l

'noatime' is the default for 3.x kernels, so no need to do anything
about that in fstab.

> Xfce does auto-mount the partitions and the WD never spins down,
> the LED shows access every few seconds, even with nothing else
> but Xfce and the screensaver running. Suse 11.2, Ubuntu Quantal
> and Arch Linux (all 64-bit) also make the WD spin down and up
> when the partitions are mounted.
> 
> *restart*

:) If you don't tend to do that very often, you may be interested
to know (I think it's still so) that most 2.5" HDDs are designed
for a 50:50 duty cycle. It may be that they spin down partly to
force some heat saving, as well as save the environment.

I have a Soekris Net4801 around here somewhere, which has a 2.5"
HDD mounted directly above its CPU in a very small case. IIRC;
it cost about 5 times the price of an ordinary drive - to get
'always on' in the spec.

Just about to gdisk a 3TiB Seagate !Green Barracuda.
I mitigate its carbon footprint by never flying and rarely bathing!

-- 
John.