[mythtv-users] WD Green drives (was "complete system meltdown")

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 22:27:51 -0500, you wrote:

>Ok, so the drive that died today (installed Dec. 31st) was a 2TB WD Green.
>Used the parking util seconds after installing it.
>
>My other storage drive (a 1.5TB WD Green) has, knock on wood, been running
>flawlessly since April 2011. So, for those of you with WD greens, is it
>generally a good drive and there are some bad apples?
>
>Just wondering because, of course, I'm RMA'ing it and will just be getting
>another Green back

I would say just one bad apple.  I have five of the 3 Tbyte Green
drives of varying ages and have had no problems with them.  I have
just added a 4 Tbyte WD40EZRX Green drive and it is working fine too.
Of course, I have used idle3ctl on all of them to prevent them parking
the heads all the time.

I also have a 1.5 Tbyte WD15EADS Green drive that has just been taken
out of service due to having suddenly got over 300 bad sectors.  I did
not lose any data when the bad sectors happened, but I took that as an
indication that it was getting old and have retired it from active
service.  I bought it on 21-Apr-2009 and it was running 24/7 in my
Windows box from then until last year when it was replaced by a 3
Tbyte Green drive.  It had a layoff of only a few months before it
became a video storage drive on my MythTV box, until last December
when it got all those bad sectors.  So, while it did not last as long
as I might have hoped, as a cheap drive I have had my money's worth.

I do have a 9 Gbyte 10,000 rpm IBM SCSI drive in my OS/2 box that is
over 13 years old, and has been running 24/7 for all of that.  I did
have a 27 Gbyte 15,000 rpm Seagate SCSI drive that lasted 10 or 11
years.  Both were very expensive when bought.  It does seem that the
more expensive drives do last longer, but you still need to pick your
manufacturer.  From what I have seen recently, Hitachi (which used to
be IBM) is the most reliable brand, but that may or may not last now
they are owned by WD.  I would personally not buy any of the Seagate
"desktop" drives at all at the moment - seem to fail at a very high
rate when used 24/7, over 25% per year.  Their NAS and enterprise
class ones may be OK.

My read on the WD Green drives is that they are a fairly cheap drive
but reasonably well made, and not pushing the tolerances due to the
slower rotation rate.  In general, it seems that Hitachi is best, then
WD, with Seagate at the bottom.  But there is no way to know when a
brand or a factory goes bad except after the fact when their drives
start dying.

With all drives, there is a certain rate of infant mortality, and you
may have just been a victim of that.  After the first month, the rate
of failures normally drops away until the drives have been running for
several years, and then curves up again gently but keeps curving
upwards.  So drives start dying off slowly, with the rate picking up
over the next few years until they are almost all gone.  The trick is
to replace drives before their death rate goes up too much, so you
never get caught.  I just wish that drive statistics were published
automatically somehow so that you could do that, but of course the
drive manufacturers would never do that, and even if they were
required by law they would figure out how to fudge the numbers
somehow.

I really do recommend that everyone have smartmontools installed and
reporting on all your drives, and also that you check the SMART data
every month or so for any anomalies.  I have been saved several times
now by SMART reports telling me a drive is going bad, and that has
usually meant that I have been able to copy off all the data before it
died.