Re: [OT] Hard Drive Energy Not Worth Conserving drives?
teddieeb@tmo.blackberry.net put forth on 1/10/2011 11:29 PM:
>
> I think what we mainly should take from all this is Western Digital sucks and we should never buy their crap...
>
> I know there are some who will disagree with this, so no flames needed...
Not a flame at all here. Totally agree WRT Green drives. As I've stated or eluded to many times in this thread, I think their Green "advanced format" drives Suck--yes that's with a capital S.
They may be OK under MS Windows but not Linux. They may yet work well with Linux if/when the partitioners get up to speed. However I think the power savings push is a joke. Most of the people buying them aren't using them in a manner conducive to allowing them to shut down aggressively as they are programmed to. I'm guessing many of these Green drives will start failing at the 2-3 year mark due to excessive head parking, prompting WD to pull them from the market or rewrite the firmware so they're not as aggressively "Green". They'll then rename them after the current Green brand gets a bad reputation. They'll rename the entire line, eliminating the Blue and Green lines altogether. The new name will be something like "Azure" with marketing speak something like "the best features of the former Blue and Green drives". They'll keep the Black drives, and introduce a new line so they still have three lines. The new one will be called something like "Red" with a subtitle "F
ormula 1 Ferrari Red" and will be a 10k rpm drive replacing the Raptor line. Disclaimer: I don't work for WDC. If these things come to pass, it is strictly coincidence I mentioned them first. :)
The Blue drives are fine. My server, through which this email will travel on its way to you, uses a single 3.5" 500GB WD Blue drive. Runs like a champ, no problems. Installed Oct 3, 2009, IIRC:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 143 142 021 Pre-fail Always - 3808
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 33
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 087 087 000 Old_age Always - 9494
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 32
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 17
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 15
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 118 104 000 Old_age Always - 25
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0
I have no personal experience with the Black series drives, but I've neither heard nor read anything bad about them.
--
Stan
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