[mythtv-users] warning for anyone with western digital green drives

John Drescher drescherjm at gmail.com
Thu Jan 5 16:54:09 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net> wrote:
> Recently I got to poking around at the SMART data for all of my
> drives. When I did, I noticed that one of my media drives...a 2TB
> western digital green drive...had an interesting looking number for
> one of it's parameters. The parameter was "Load Cycle Count" and the
> value was over 500,000. I looked into it, and this value represents
> the number of times the heads have been unloaded on the drive.
> Apparently, in an effort to conserve power, the green drives are
> exceptionally aggressive at this, unloading the heads after just 8
> seconds of idle time. Over the 1.5 years I had this drive, that count
> had reached over 500k. The alarming thing is that these drives are
> only rated to handle 300k load cycles.
>
> Apparently this is a very common problem noted by many linux users
> with these drives. The way to solve this problem is download the
> wdidle3 utility (you must boot into DOS to run it) and use it to
> either disable the feature or set the timeout to a larger value.
>

I have a few of these drives (along with hitachi and samsung 2TB
drives). I believe I set my idle time (with wdidle3) on these to
whatever was the maximum 3hours? 6 hours?


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