On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 9:36 AM, <meino.cra...@gmx.de> wrote: > Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> [10-06-01 17:04]: >> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:35 AM, <meino.cra...@gmx.de> wrote: >> > >> > Hi, >> > >> > The WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 1TB "green" harddisk has an design flaw: >> > The heads are parked after a much too short time. Or in other words: >> > The designed maximum of head-park-cycles are reached much too fast. >> >> I have 2TB samsung drives which, by default, park heads very quickly. >> Using hdparm I changed power saving mode from "off" (which parks after >> a minute) to "254" and now the heads never park. (Different levels can >> give different results). Maybe your WD drive is similar. >> > > Hi Paul, > > thanks fopr your help. > > When I submit a > > sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda > > I get back: > > /dev/sda: > APM_level = not supported > > > when I do a > > sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda > > I get back > > /dev/sda: > setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) > HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error > APM_level = not supported > > so I think I loose the game. > > Or did you use other options? > > Best regards, > mcc >
I have 7 of these drives but only two in operation at this time. I can confirm that they don't respond to most of the APM command set and to date I've not found a way (within Linux) to reset the head parking times. There are reports of wdidle3 not really helping. Apparently it has a maximum that isn't all that much higher than what the drives do by default. I haven't had the time (or the need frankly) to get around to looking at this yet but I'd be happy to take a shot at it if we can come up with a plan of attack. I think it will require both changing the values and then some amount of testing to ensure we know what the side effects are. - Mark
