Messages in this thread |  | | | From | "Tvrtko A. Ursulin" <> | | Subject | Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux | | Date | Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:48:08 +0100 |
On Wednesday 09 April 2008 21:18:35 Tvrtko A. Ursulin wrote:
> I got one of them (WD5000AACS) recently and to my horror after less than
> three days of being power on this is what I saw:
>
> 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 66
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 197 197 000 Old_age Always - 10233
>
> At this rate the disk would reach it's design limit for load/unload cycles
> in around 80 days. Not good - so I implemented a lame workaround of keeping
> disk busy every couple of seconds - hopefully that won't kill it sooner
> that unloads would..
>
> I am also currently talking with first line of WD's tech support trying to
> get some data on how exactly those drives manage head unloading, but that
> may not lead anywhere useful.
I got back from WD's tech support and received a DOS utility which can control
this drive feature, apparently using vendor specific commands. With it head
unload timer can be disabled or set to a period between 100ms and 25.5s.
Of course I asked for more than a DOS utility, but the question really is how
was this feature intended to work with Windows for example, is there
something there which would prevent such rapid load/unload cycle growth, and
why isn't it documented somewhere?
I am kind off hoping that someone from WD is reading this list and will notice
this in case my effort with tech support fails.
Tvrtko
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