Greg Erskine wrote: > Thanks for the info gordonb3. > > Most of my USB drives are far older than 2 years, but all but one are > backup drives so they are not powered up very often. > > The LMS USB drive only has only the music files on it, nothing is > written to it during normal operation. Thru chance I have probably > cycled my drives as "the LMS USB drive". > > My LMS boots from the SD card. > > piCorePlayer does not start syslog but default. > > So with these factors in place, I have managed to dodge the bullet. > > regards > Greg Do note that the issue is not related to writing - this is what kills solid state memory devices if done frequently. The issue with green drives is mechanical wear due to the heads going in and out of park based on a timed trigger. Thus regardless of whether you are reading or writing, if your typical use scenario accesses the disk every 15 seconds, which is greater than the spin down and park timer (7 seconds), then the drive will wake up 4 times per minute, 240 times per hour, 2.1 million times per year. The wear may be noticed in the form of clicking noises or even a sound that resembles spring release. The smartctl tool may expose if LMS allows this trigger to occur during listening, possibly depending on file type (native or transcoded streaming), and so determine if action should be taken.
If you own a WD green drive there is a tool named wdidle3 that allows changing the drive's idle timer to either a different value or disable completely, effectively turning it into a red drive suitable for NAS operation. Interestingly this may in fact cause the drive to use less power overall as it uses up to 2A (I recently had a PSU with this rating burn up on a converted green drive that is effectively beyond EOL) for startup but less than 100mA for idle spinning. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ gordonb3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=71050 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=114879 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list unix@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
