[mythtv-users] Quiet, reliable hard drives

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 16:09:07 -0600, you wrote:

>On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Doug Lytle <support at drdos.info> wrote:
>
>> >>> The Reds had an annoying churning noise when mythtv recording.
>>
>> The one thing that I make sure to check with the Reds is to disable the
>> head parking.
>>
>> Even though they're meant for a NAS, I had several delivered with it
>> enabled,
>>
>> Doug
>>
>
>I have 3 raid arrays - one of which is built with (5) ST6000NM0024 6TB
>drives.  The drives idle sleep and heads auto park - and removing them and
>setting it to off individually still did not work.  The enclosure I use has
>no way for me to turn it off either, so I just make sure I am writing to
>the array every 30 seconds and the "clunk" stays gone.  dd in the
>background writing to the same file over and over.   In hindsight, I should
>have left them JBOD and used linux to raid them where I could have smartctl
>them on each boot, but oh well.  Once you copy that much data to them, it
>really becomes inherently expensive to back it up - which I am not going to
>do for media and lab machines.
>
>My other 2 arrays (WD for one and Hitachi for the other) do not idle sleep
>and park heads.  It is fairly annoying knowing I am wearing out the drives
>sooner than need be and also my vendor of choice for enclosure (formerly)
>and raid functionality does not seem to care, but it is what it is..  Just
>remember - "Enterprise Capacity" does not mean "Enterprise" class with the
>newer Seagates :)

You can use the Linux idle3ctl command to set that problem idle3 timer
on WD drives.  You will probably need to install it as I do not
believe it is a default package on most distros.