[mythtv-users] Anyone using SSD for long term storage?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2014 10:46:59 -0400, you wrote:

>On 07/23/2014 10:08 AM, michael Schumacher wrote:
>>> WD Green don't play nicely with Linux avoid them
>> this is a five year old link. I am sure that none of the mentioned
>> drives are still in production.
>
>Right.  For one, WD has already said that the max value of 300K parks 
>reported by smarttools is wrong and it was designed to be much higher 
>(IIRC, it was >1M).
>
>And wdidle3.exe should allow you to set the parking timer to 5min if you 
>set it to the max--it did for all of mine (and that's what they're using).
>
>Mike

The constant load/unload problem with WD drives can occur in Windows
as well - I had it happen on one of my WD Black drives.  It just
depends on the timing of what is happening on the drive.  However, due
to the way Linux works, it is much more likely to happen there with
the standard timing on the WD Green drives.  But the solution is
simple - just use idle3ctl (the Linux open source equivalent of WD's
wdidle3.exe program) and set the timeouts on your drives to
appropriate values.  idle3ctl is much easier to use than wdidle3.exe
as you do not have to use a DOS boot.  You just unmount the partitions
on the drive, run idle3ctl, then cycle the power on the drive and
remount it.

WD Green drives do have potential problems with being used in RAID
arrays - they are not designed for that.  But it is basically just a
firmware problem - the wrong timeouts for RAID, and IIRC, one missing
command.

And any cheap drive "desktop" is not designed for a heavy vibration
environment, as happens when you run many drives in a single mount
that can transmit the vibrations from one drive to another (eg rack
mount or standard desktop case).  The expensive "enterprise" class
drives are supposedly designed to cope with vibrations much better,
but my guess is that they may not be as cost effective as just using
the cheap drives and replacing them as necessary in your RAID arrays.

So far I have had no problems with any of my many WD Green drives. The
oldest one I have (1.5 Tbyte) is now retired after starting to have
increasing numbers of bad sectors, but it was a bit over five years
old and had been running 24x7 for most of that so I am not unhappy at
that sort of lifetime for a cheap drive.  The rest of them (3 and 4
Tbyte models) are rather younger so I do not really know how long they
will last yet.