24 Dec
2010
24 Dec
'10
5:56 p.m.
On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:28:50 +0100
Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings(a)folkwang-hochschule.de> wrote:
On 12/23/2010 09:15 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
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)
JR
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).