I have a WD10EADS-22M2B0. Manufacture date printed on the drive is 17 MAR 2010, and I haven't attempted any firmware updates, if applicable.
There appear to be some drives out there that support a much wider range of IntelliPark timeouts, and support TLER. My idle timer only goes up to 300s, or can be completely disabled, which I didn't do, since I heard rumors that it silently turned off other power-saving features. I also tried enabling TLER, to no avail. I guess I got the cheaper kind. On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 09:34 +1300, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote: > Hrm, do you have model number of the drives? > > I have some WD drives in a raid 10 array (LVM2 + EXT4 + linux) for my > media PC and it would be useful to figure out if some of the issues I > have seen over the last year have been related to the use of drive. > > On 10 December 2010 08:48, Aaron Suen <warr1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > It looks like the IntelliPark feature on a Western Digital Caviar Green > > HDD can cause issues with OpenBSD, which can be fixed/mitigated by > > disabling IntelliPark. > > > > About 6 months ago, I built myself a new amd64 machine. I decided to > > optimize for low wattage--reducing power costs and waste heat, > > increasing UPS runtime--and so I chose a single Western Digital Caviar > > Green HDD. Although these drives are intended/marketed for something > > more like nearline storage, according to bonnie++, the drive performed > > roughly as well as the 7200RPM PATA-100 2-drive mirror in my old > > machine. > > > > The machine I built, initially running 4.7/amd64, then 4.8/amd64 (both > > unmodified -RELEASE) was never stable for more than a couple of days at > > a time. The machine would freeze hard, sometimes with the HDD light lit > > solid, usually not. I worked around a number of bugs, trying a patched > > kernel with http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=128897915014154&w=2, and > > disabling installing an fxp(4) so I could disable the onboard re(4). I > > wrote scripts to monitor hw.sensors, SMART, and various stats from > > systat(1), and graph them using rrdtool. What I noticed was that my > > machine would generally crash right before an IO-intensive cronjob > > started. > > > > I also noticed that SMART stat 193 (Load/Unload Cycle Count) was very > > high, and climbing rapidly. Doing some research on this stat, I found > > out that WD Caviar Green drives have a feature called IntelliPark that > > parks the HDD heads after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is supposed to > > make the HDD more efficient, but has been reported not to play well with > > Linux, and WD provides a workaround: the WDIDLE3 utility, which would > > allow me to change/disable the IntelliPark 8-second timeout. I ran > > WDIDLE3 on my WD Caviar Green HDD, setting the timeout to the maximum > > allowed (300 seconds). I have a monitoring process running that writes > > to disk roughly every 60 seconds, so IntelliPark is effectively disabled > > for me. As of now, the system has been up a record 19.5 days without > > issue. > > > > Disabling IntelliPark fixed the major freeze issue I was having. I > > don't know exactly what was going on, but it seems like the drive would > > get stuck in a state in which the head reloading had failed, or had not > > completed within a certain timespan, and the OS and the drive controller > > become deadlocked. Attempting to reproduce the problem is painful, both > > in terms of how long it can take to cause a freeze, and for the wearing > > out it did of the drive. I'm not sure if I should file this as a PR, or > > consider this a design flaw in the drive (or a consequence of > > "off-label" use) and just be content with the fix/workaround that I've > > found. > > > > If anyone has any recommendations, or any experiences with the Caviar > > Green drives, I'd like to hear them.
