WD green drive
I was thinking about the
Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB
Which newwegg has for $49.95 free shipping. The WD util seems to be only for
certain models and they warn against using it on any others. This model is not
included.
>From the wd site....
This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before
positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary
electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following
hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.
This is for util - wdidle3_1_05.zip
So not sure wether this drive is a good choice or not. I am not sure what the
stock head park time is but I guess you could always cron something to access
the disk at a higher rate than the park timeout.
There is a really confusing amount of stuff out there about the new drives and
Linux!
Doug
Doug Crompton
WA3DSP
www.crompton.com
----- Original Message ----
From: Tobias Frost <tobi@frost.de>
To: Doug <dsc3507@yahoo.com>
Cc: debian-arm@lists.debian.org
Sent: Sun, January 2, 2011 9:00:05 AM
Subject: Re: Unidentified subject!
On Sat, 2011-01-01 at 18:19 -0800, Doug wrote:
> I wonder what the groups experience has been with low power drives under Linux
> on the nslu2? I see there are a lot of complaints about the WD Cavier Green
> drives on all OS's but others seem to have no problems.
I've got a WD Caviar Green (WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0), 2TB version in my
Thecus. currently I do not see any problems with it, beside that you
have to make sure that you re-configure it with a WD-supplied tool to
tweak some power saving setting (the timeout until the heads are parked,
to be more detailed), otherwise the "Load Cycle Count" will go up pretty
fast, exceeding the lifetime spec of this parameter quite fast.
(NB: I had to RMA the first one I got, it had bad sectors out of factory
and the RAID didn't sync because of this)
> I am also interested in experiences with flash drives. I would go that route
>but
>
>
> the uncertainty of write cycle life leaves me a little concerned. I can
>remember
>
>
> way back when 10K writes was the norm life, then 100K, 1M, 10M but just what
> is the write life of these 8-64G USB sticks now and are some better than
> others? I know you can do things to extend the life but what have real
> experiences been? Has anyone "burned" one of these useless on an nslu2?
On the same machine I use a SanDisk Cruzer 8GB stick for /var/log (fs:
ext2). It is now one year old and shows the first bad sectors.
> I suspect one of the other small arm devices with more RAM might be a better
> choice if you were using a flash drive.
>
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