[mythtv-users] WD15EARS WD Green drives

[DaWorm]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 11:29 PM, Digital Hit Entertainment
<dhenews at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Found a great sale on the WD15EARS Green 1.5 TB drive. I saw some earlier stuff on the list about the drive and wanted to know if the latest MythTV versions have any problems with them.
>
> Any tips or things to watch out for?

I have four in a software Raid5 setup on my server/backend.  It took
me quite a while to get it right, but eventually I did.  As noted, the
main thing to look for is to make sure you make your partitions start
on a 4K boundary.  By default, fdisk will start at sector 63 on these
drive.  Just change that to 64 and you will be ok (with 1.5 TB, don't
worry about the tiny bit of space lost because of this).  I've seen
instructions saying to use parted instead of fdisk, but that's really
not necessary.  The link someone else provided to the WD tutorial
covers this.

The other thing you will want to do if you run these in a raid, is get
the utility to turn automatic spindown off.  These drives spin down
after a very short time (part of what makes them "green").  In a raid
environment this kills the performance, and will make the SMART
numbers climb past the warning point very quickly.  Do a search for
EARS and TLER for info on how to do this.

Jeff.