1 |
On 25/08/12 15:55, Florian Philipp wrote: |
2 |
> I've just checked out the man page for hdparm. There I noticed the |
3 |
> new -J switch. It reads: |
4 |
> |
5 |
>> Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout |
6 |
>> value. This timeout controls how often the drive parks its heads and |
7 |
>> enters a low power consumption state. The factory default is eight |
8 |
>> (8) seconds, which is a very poor choice for use with Linux. Leaving |
9 |
>> it at the default will result in hundreds of thousands of head |
10 |
>> load/unload cycles in a very short period of time. The drive |
11 |
>> mechanism is only rated for 300,000 to 1,000,000 cycles, so leaving |
12 |
>> it at the default could result in premature failure, not to mention |
13 |
>> the performance impact of the drive often having to wake-up before |
14 |
>> doing routine I/O. |
15 |
>> |
16 |
>> WD supply a WDIDLE3.EXE DOS utility for tweaking this setting, and |
17 |
>> you should use that program instead of hdparm if at all possible. |
18 |
>> The reverse-engineered implementation in hdparm is not as complete |
19 |
>> as the original official program, even though it does seem to work on |
20 |
>> at a least a few drives. [...] |
21 |
>> |
22 |
>> A setting of 30 seconds is recommended for Linux use. [...] |
23 |
> |
24 |
> I've never heard of this. Are other Caviar Green users aware of this? |
25 |
> Anyone having any experience with this? |
26 |
|
27 |
I have the same issue with a Seagate drive. The problem isn't just |
28 |
reduced lifetime, but also an annoying high pitch sound when that |
29 |
happens, and an also annoying freeze on the first disk I/O after the |
30 |
heads have been parked. |
31 |
|
32 |
The solution to this however is different; I use "-B 255" to disable |
33 |
that feature entirely. Parking the heads *at all* is just brain |
34 |
damaged. There's no reason at all. I don't know if the WD disks |
35 |
support the -B option though. |