Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 11:38:34AM +0200, David Haller wrote: I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market. Anyhoo... I just checked the values: […] But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago. As I said in another mail: laptop drives are built for frequent unloading. Your number does seem a bit high though, that's about 1000 load cycles per hour... My Pa bought the same HDD model for his laptop a few months back. Last weekend I visited him and loaded a diag tool on his Windows. It showed 20 or 30.000 cycle counts. So I guess my model just has a bad firmware or summit like that. Perhaps that's why it was so cheap back then (only ~62€ for a 500 GB drive by the end of 2008). Oh well, I'll just have to remember to do backups a bit more often. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. A boss is a human just like everyone else, he just doesn’t know. pgp6vNBpCjr9H.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
You guys might find this study from google interesting: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Frank Steinmetzger war...@gmx.de wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 11:38:34AM +0200, David Haller wrote: I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market. Anyhoo... I just checked the values: […] But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago. As I said in another mail: laptop drives are built for frequent unloading. Your number does seem a bit high though, that's about 1000 load cycles per hour... My Pa bought the same HDD model for his laptop a few months back. Last weekend I visited him and loaded a diag tool on his Windows. It showed 20 or 30.000 cycle counts. So I guess my model just has a bad firmware or summit like that. Perhaps that's why it was so cheap back then (only ~62€ for a 500 GB drive by the end of 2008). Oh well, I'll just have to remember to do backups a bit more often. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. A boss is a human just like everyone else, he just doesn’t know.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Sat, 12 May 2012, Mick wrote: Is this 193 Load_Cycle_Count an issue only on the green drives? AFAIK it was a firmware bug on some models. I have a very old Compaq laptop here that shows: # smartctl -A /dev/sda | egrep Power_On|Load_Cycle 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 055 055 000Old_age Always - 19830 193 Load_Cycle_Count0x0012 001 001 000Old_age Always - 1739734 Laptop drives are _built_ for unloading frequently to protect the drive from bumps and also to save power. Desktop drives are _not_ built for that. So, don't worry. HTH, -dnh -- Death: I am last minute stuff!
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Sat, 12 May 2012, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:20:57PM -0400, Norman Invasion wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market. Anyhoo... I just checked the values: Power on hours:11500 Start/stop count: 2797 Power cycle count: 2197 But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago. As I said in another mail: laptop drives are built for frequent unloading. Your number does seem a bit high though, that's about 1000 load cycles per hour... OTOH, I just became a bit nervous when looking at smartctl's output... Reallocated sectors:7 (threshold 10) Calibration retry count: 1631 Load retry count:1631 That's not healty. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. HTH, -dnh -- To resist the influence of others, knowledge of one's self is most important. -- Teal'C, Stargate SG-1, 9x14 - Stronghold
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thursday 10 May 2012 19:51:14 Mark Knecht wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was something like 30 max with the drive currently clocking in at 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone 2x at this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to put a backup drive in the box to get ready. Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be at 40. It only made it another month or so before having unrecoverable errors. Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193 Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I gots my suspicions. Many of 'em highly suspectable. It's part of the 'Wear Out Failure' part of the Bathtub Curve posted in the last few days. That said, some Toyotas go 100K miles, and others go 500K miles. Same car, same spec, same production line, different owners, different roads, different climates, etc. It's not possible to absolutely know when any drive will fail. I suspect that the 300K spec is just that, a spec. They'd replace the drive if it failed at 299,999 and wouldn't replace it at 300,001. That said, they don't want to spec thing too tightly, and I doubt many people make a purchasing decision on a spec like this, so for the vast majority of drives most likely they'd do far more than 300K. At 2 minutes per count on that specific WD Green Drive, if a home machine is turned on for instance 5 hours a day (6PM to 11PM) then 300K count equates to around 6 years. To me that seems pretty generous for a low cost home machine. However for a 24/7 production server it's a pretty fast replacement schedule. Here's data for my 500GB WD RAID Edition drives in my compute server here. It's powered down almost every night but doesn't suffer from the same firmware issues. The machine was built in April, 2010, so it's a bit of 2 years old. Note that it's been powered on less than 1/2 the number of hours but only has a 193 count of 907 vs 70! Cheers, Mark c2stable ~ # smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.2.12-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital RE3 Serial ATA Device Model: WDC WD5002ABYS-02B1B0 Serial Number:WD-WCASYA846988 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2042c3477 Firmware Version: 02.03B03 User Capacity:500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is:In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is:Thu May 10 11:45:45 2012 PDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x84) Offline data collection activity was suspended by an interrupting command from host. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status:
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Am Samstag, 12. Mai 2012, 10:34:12 schrieb Mick: On Thursday 10 May 2012 19:51:14 Mark Knecht wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was something like 30 max with the drive currently clocking in at 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone 2x at this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to put a backup drive in the box to get ready. Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be at 40. It only made it another month or so before having unrecoverable errors. Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193 Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I gots my suspicions. Many of 'em highly suspectable. It's part of the 'Wear Out Failure' part of the Bathtub Curve posted in the last few days. That said, some Toyotas go 100K miles, and others go 500K miles. Same car, same spec, same production line, different owners, different roads, different climates, etc. It's not possible to absolutely know when any drive will fail. I suspect that the 300K spec is just that, a spec. They'd replace the drive if it failed at 299,999 and wouldn't replace it at 300,001. That said, they don't want to spec thing too tightly, and I doubt many people make a purchasing decision on a spec like this, so for the vast majority of drives most likely they'd do far more than 300K. At 2 minutes per count on that specific WD Green Drive, if a home machine is turned on for instance 5 hours a day (6PM to 11PM) then 300K count equates to around 6 years. To me that seems pretty generous for a low cost home machine. However for a 24/7 production server it's a pretty fast replacement schedule. Here's data for my 500GB WD RAID Edition drives in my compute server here. It's powered down almost every night but doesn't suffer from the same firmware issues. The machine was built in April, 2010, so it's a bit of 2 years old. Note that it's been powered on less than 1/2 the number of hours but only has a 193 count of 907 vs 70! Cheers, Mark c2stable ~ # smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.2.12-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital RE3 Serial ATA Device Model: WDC WD5002ABYS-02B1B0 Serial Number:WD-WCASYA846988 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2042c3477 Firmware Version: 02.03B03 User Capacity:500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is:In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is:Thu May 10 11:45:45 2012 PDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x84) Offline data collection activity was
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:20:57PM -0400, Norman Invasion wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market. Anyhoo... I just checked the values: Power on hours:11500 Start/stop count: 2797 Power cycle count: 2197 But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago. OTOH, I just became a bit nervous when looking at smartctl's output... Reallocated sectors:7 (threshold 10) Calibration retry count: 1631 Load retry count:1631 -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. Humans lose most of their time trying to gain time.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 06:58:47PM -0500, Dale wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark You make a good point too. I had a headlight to go out on my car once long ago. I, not thinking, replaced them both since the new ones were brighter. Guess what, when one of the bulbs blew out, the other was out VERY soon after. Now, I replace them but NOT at the same time. Keep in mind, just like a hard drive, when one headlight is on, so is the other one. When we turn our computers on, all the drives spin up together so they are basically all getting the same wear and tear effect. I don't use RAID, except to kill bugs, but that is good advice. People who do use RAID would be wise to use it. Dale :-) :-) hum hum! I know that Windows does this by default (it annoys me so I disable it) but does linux disable or stop running the disks if they're inactive? I'm assuming there's an option somewhere - maybe just `unmount`! pgpVjOteoYJTu.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
nap...@squareownz.org wrote: On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 06:58:47PM -0500, Dale wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark You make a good point too. I had a headlight to go out on my car once long ago. I, not thinking, replaced them both since the new ones were brighter. Guess what, when one of the bulbs blew out, the other was out VERY soon after. Now, I replace them but NOT at the same time. Keep in mind, just like a hard drive, when one headlight is on, so is the other one. When we turn our computers on, all the drives spin up together so they are basically all getting the same wear and tear effect. I don't use RAID, except to kill bugs, but that is good advice. People who do use RAID would be wise to use it. Dale :-) :-) hum hum! I know that Windows does this by default (it annoys me so I disable it) but does linux disable or stop running the disks if they're inactive? I'm assuming there's an option somewhere - maybe just `unmount`! The default is to keep them all running and to not spin them down. I have never had a Linux OS to spin down a drive unless I set/told it to. You can do this tho. The command and option is: hdparm -S /dev/sdX X would be the drive number. There is also the -s option but it is not recommended. There is also the -y and -Y options. Before using ANY of these, read the man page. Each one has it uses and you need to know for sure which one does what you want. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
* Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com [120509 19:54]: [..] Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. At the beginning of the curve, the thought was it could be a bad solder job, bad components or some other problem. At the other end was just when age kicked in. Sweat spot is in the middle. C. Gordon Bell has that curve in his book Computer Engineering. Available online at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Computer_Engineering/index.html for HTML and: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/CGB%20Files/Computer%20Engineering%207809%20c.pdf for the PDF. Todd
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 07:38:34AM -0500, Dale wrote: The default is to keep them all running and to not spin them down. I have never had a Linux OS to spin down a drive unless I set/told it to. You can do this tho. The command and option is: hdparm -S /dev/sdX X would be the drive number. There is also the -s option but it is not recommended. There is also the -y and -Y options. Before using ANY of these, read the man page. Each one has it uses and you need to know for sure which one does what you want. Dale Awesome thanks very much, if I need to power down one of my drives I shall use hdparam! Does the kernel keep even unmounted drives spinning by default? Thank you Dale! pgpE8P0l5RqXK.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was something like 30 max with the drive currently clocking in at 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone 2x at this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to put a backup drive in the box to get ready. - Mark gandalf ~ # smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.2.12-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green (Adv. Format) Device Model: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Serial Number:WD-WCAV55464493 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2ae6b5ffe Firmware Version: 80.00A80 User Capacity:1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is:In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is:Thu May 10 10:53:59 2012 PDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection:(19800) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities:(0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities:(0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability:(0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time:( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time:( 228) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time:( 5) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x3031) SCT Status supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. 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 051Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time0x0027 131 128 021Pre-fail Always - 6441 4
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was something like 30 max with the drive currently clocking in at 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone 2x at this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to put a backup drive in the box to get ready. Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be at 40. It only made it another month or so before having unrecoverable errors. Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193 Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I gots my suspicions. Many of 'em highly suspectable.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was something like 30 max with the drive currently clocking in at 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone 2x at this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to put a backup drive in the box to get ready. Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be at 40. It only made it another month or so before having unrecoverable errors. Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193 Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I gots my suspicions. Many of 'em highly suspectable. It's part of the 'Wear Out Failure' part of the Bathtub Curve posted in the last few days. That said, some Toyotas go 100K miles, and others go 500K miles. Same car, same spec, same production line, different owners, different roads, different climates, etc. It's not possible to absolutely know when any drive will fail. I suspect that the 300K spec is just that, a spec. They'd replace the drive if it failed at 299,999 and wouldn't replace it at 300,001. That said, they don't want to spec thing too tightly, and I doubt many people make a purchasing decision on a spec like this, so for the vast majority of drives most likely they'd do far more than 300K. At 2 minutes per count on that specific WD Green Drive, if a home machine is turned on for instance 5 hours a day (6PM to 11PM) then 300K count equates to around 6 years. To me that seems pretty generous for a low cost home machine. However for a 24/7 production server it's a pretty fast replacement schedule. Here's data for my 500GB WD RAID Edition drives in my compute server here. It's powered down almost every night but doesn't suffer from the same firmware issues. The machine was built in April, 2010, so it's a bit of 2 years old. Note that it's been powered on less than 1/2 the number of hours but only has a 193 count of 907 vs 70! Cheers, Mark c2stable ~ # smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [x86_64-linux-3.2.12-gentoo] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Western Digital RE3 Serial ATA Device Model: WDC WD5002ABYS-02B1B0 Serial Number:WD-WCASYA846988 LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2042c3477 Firmware Version: 02.03B03 User Capacity:500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is:In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is:Thu May 10 11:45:45 2012 PDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x84) Offline data collection activity was suspended by an interrupting command from host. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Thu, 10 May 2012, Mark Knecht wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion invasivenor...@gmail.com wrote: They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda Very true about the 193 count. There was some bug, IIRC. http://jeanbruenn.info/2011/01/23/wd-green-discs-and-the-problem-in-linux-load-cycle-count/ and search for 'linux Load_Cycle_Count' using your favorite search site. HTH, -dnh -- Well, merry frelling christmas!-- Aeryn Sun, Farscape - 4x13 - Terra Firma
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Wed, 09 May 2012, Dale wrote: As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? Basically: they run a 5400 min^-1, the normal ones at 7200 min^-1 and the green use less power. Years ago, a normal drive took 10-13W running, up to 27W during spinup. Now it's IIRC 4-6W running and some more during spinup (haven't seen any figures lately). I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Yes. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. Hm. You've been out of the loop. Of those 3, only one remains. Maxtor was bought by Seagate some years ago and Samsung this year, there's now appearing the first Samsung drives from Seagate (I got one of those, odd labeling, sold as 2000GB Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL004 (HD204UI) So, now there's only 3.5 to 4 Manufacturers left: WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba (and Fujitsu?) manufacturing only 2.5 laptop drives. Other sellers like cnMemory etc. used to repackage Samsung drives (IIRC the othere Manufatureres did not allow that), I wonder what those will do now that Samsung is bought up by Seagate. HTH, -dnh -- I am supposed to be the info provider, so here is my answer: 42 By the way: What is the question? -- Johannes Meixner in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=190173
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Wed, 09 May 2012, Alan McKinnon wrote: One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. Which ones? I've got one of all Models of the last years, and to none applies what you're saying. -dnh -- If breathing required conscious thought, the world population would be on a sharp decline.-- Greg Andrews
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello, On Wed, 09 May 2012, Dale wrote: While on the thread. Has anyone had any sort of luck with the recertified drives? Avoid them. -dnh -- Well I wish you'd just tell me rather than try to engage my enthusiasm. -- Marvin
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. Hi Dale, One thing I wanted to point out about the task you have in front of you. There is a problem in your work statement here and it really comes down to one single one letter word. That word was 'a', as in buy me _a_ LARGE hard drive No matter what drive you purchase, and no matter how well you treat it, they all fail eventually and you lose your movies all the time it takes to put it back together again. At a minimum, if you plan on buying one to use then you need to buy a _second_ drive to do backups of the first. You need to rsync that second drive on a regular basis and then disconnect it and put it in a different place in the house, or even better, store it in a safety deposit box to protect against theft or your house burning down, etc. This sort of comment certainly goes for the system as a whole, but at a seasoned Gentoo user I'm sure you're doing that already. ;-) Just don't forget to do the same for this new drive. Have fun, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, 10 May 2012 21:38:20 +0200 David Haller gen...@dhaller.de wrote: Hello, On Wed, 09 May 2012, Alan McKinnon wrote: One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. Which ones? I've got one of all Models of the last years, and to none applies what you're saying. -dnh I wasn't talking from my experience, I was talking from my developer colleagues' experience. I'll find out which drive models they used. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, 10 May 2012 21:36:46 +0200, David Haller wrote: Basically: they run a 5400 min^-1, the normal ones at 7200 min^-1 and the green use less power. Some green drives run at 5900rpm. -- Neil Bothwick WinErr 01E: Timing error - Please wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
nap...@squareownz.org wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 07:38:34AM -0500, Dale wrote: The default is to keep them all running and to not spin them down. I have never had a Linux OS to spin down a drive unless I set/told it to. You can do this tho. The command and option is: hdparm -S /dev/sdX X would be the drive number. There is also the -s option but it is not recommended. There is also the -y and -Y options. Before using ANY of these, read the man page. Each one has it uses and you need to know for sure which one does what you want. Dale Awesome thanks very much, if I need to power down one of my drives I shall use hdparam! Does the kernel keep even unmounted drives spinning by default? Thank you Dale! From my experience, as I posted I have never had Linux spin down a drive without me telling it to or setting it up to do so. If you want that to be disabled as you have it in windows, the default settings should be fine. If you have a drive that is not being used, then you can use one of those commands to shut it down to save power, wear and tear or whatever. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thursday 10 May 2012 00:58:47 Dale wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark You make a good point too. I had a headlight to go out on my car once long ago. I, not thinking, replaced them both since the new ones were brighter. Guess what, when one of the bulbs blew out, the other was out VERY soon after. Now, I replace them but NOT at the same time. Keep in mind, just like a hard drive, when one headlight is on, so is the other one. When we turn our computers on, all the drives spin up together so they are basically all getting the same wear and tear effect. Unless you're driving something out of the 60's before halogen bulbs came out, you didn't by any chance touched them with your greasy fingers - did you? Because that's a promoter of early failure (unequal temperature tension caused by impurities on the glass). It's better to use a clean tissue or the foam wrapper they are packed in and take care not to touch them with your fingers at all. Should you inadvertently do so, then you'll need to clean them with meths or similar degreaser. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 6:55 AM, nap...@squareownz.org wrote: hum hum! I know that Windows does this by default (it annoys me so I disable it) but does linux disable or stop running the disks if they're inactive? I'm assuming there's an option somewhere - maybe just `unmount`! Some drives cannot have this spindown feature disabled, because it is a fixed value in their firmware in order to be green... You can adjust the power management setting with hdparm, and on some drives this allows disabling the spindown or disabling power management altogether. On my HDDs, I cannot disable APM but I can disable spindown by changing the power-saving level to 254. I have a script in /etc/local.d/ which calls: hdparm -B 254 /dev/sd[abcdef] at boot time. To quote the hdparm manpage: A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. Possible settings range from values 1 through 127 (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254 (which do not permit spin-down). The highest degree of power management is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 254. A value of 255 tells hdparm to disable Advanced Power Management altogether on the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, 10 May 2012 17:53:27 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote: On my HDDs, I cannot disable APM but I can disable spindown by changing the power-saving level to 254. I have a script in /etc/local.d/ which calls: You don't need a script, add the options you need to /etc/conf.d/hdparm and add hdparm to the default runlevel. hdparm -B 254 /dev/sd[abcdef] That doesn't work with my WD WD20EARX drives, which just report APM disabled when I run it. -- Neil Bothwick Eagles may soar, but Wombles don't get sucked into jet engines signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hello,
On Fri, 11 May 2012, Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Thu, 10 May 2012 17:53:27 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote:
On my HDDs, I cannot disable APM but I can disable spindown by
changing the power-saving level to 254. I have a script in
/etc/local.d/ which calls:
You don't need a script, add the options you need to /etc/conf.d/hdparm
and add hdparm to the default runlevel.
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sd[abcdef]
That doesn't work with my WD WD20EARX drives, which just report APM
disabled when I run it.
Oh boy, we did get confused in this thread, did we?
RTFM hdparm.
a) Disk APM has usually only 3 settings, and only controls the
agressiveness or the speed of how seeks are done, i.e. how fast
the head moves seeking from track to track.
0-127 slow
128-254 fast
255 default
At least some manufacturers disable this (IIRC e.g. Seagate,
lock it to slow on the green disks and fast on enterprise.
b) spindown is a totally unrelated feature, which is can be set by
using 'hdparm -S'. I have about 20 disks in two boxen, one of them
a WD 20xxEARS, and _NONE_ spin down (until shutdown).
Have a look into your /etc/pm-profiler/{YOUR_PROFILE} (not sure if
that's gentoo standard, I only have a very minimal gentoo
installed). I've e.g. copied the Balanced Low Latency profile but
set
SATA_ALPM=max_performance
In the powersaving you get
SATA_ALPM=min_power
which sets (via hdparm -S) the disks to spindown after whatever
seconds (20s? I don't know).
Anyway, there is some stuff setting disk-spindown timeouts. So, choose
and/or adjust pm/upower config and/or set spindown time via 'hdparm
-S', with pm-profiler, upower, init-script, whatever.
BTW: 'hdparm -S 0' disables spindown.
HTH,
-dnh, with a seriously outdated gentoo installed only in parallel, but
I have a lot of disks and know hdparm a bit ;)
--
When the SysAdmin answers the phone politely, say sorry, hang up and
run away!
Informal advice to users at Karolinska Institutet, 1993-1994
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 12:20 -0400, Norman Invasion wrote: On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. This runs up 193 Load_Cycle_Count unacceptably: as many as a few hundred thousand in a year a million cycles is getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end up running some iteration of # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda every boot. hdparm installs an init script with a /etc/conf.d/hdparm file which allows you to set things up at whatever run level you are using. Also beware things like laptopmode which take over rewriting the kernel and harddrive parameters for dynamic power saving (i.e., different between running on battery as to from mains) - really does work but can kill a drive with Load_Cycle_Counts so drive life can be foreshortened if you get too zealous (i.e., very short spindown times and using a journalled file system. BillK
[gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Green drives are basically just low power drives. It's a branding gimmick. Like you noticed already, they tend to spin slower (uses less power). I stuck 4 of them in my media server for 12TB of cheap storage. And they are silent. I can barely hear them running even when I'm sitting next to the server and the kids are running the telly full tilt :-) I haven't heard any mention from anyone at all that they are less reliable in any way. I'd expect them to be more reliable than super-fast drives because they are lower power, but drive models have so many things affecting reliability it's hard to tell. One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Green drives are basically just low power drives. It's a branding gimmick. Like you noticed already, they tend to spin slower (uses less power). I stuck 4 of them in my media server for 12TB of cheap storage. And they are silent. I can barely hear them running even when I'm sitting next to the server and the kids are running the telly full tilt :-) I haven't heard any mention from anyone at all that they are less reliable in any way. I'd expect them to be more reliable than super-fast drives because they are lower power, but drive models have so many things affecting reliability it's hard to tell. One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! I'm going to give this a shot. It's not like the OS is on it and I will be putting a lot of wear on it or be making those heads sing. It's just going to store videos, music and other stuff. I plan to set it up with LVM and put /home on it. Then I'm going to get rid of this legacy /data directory I have been carrying around for the past 7 or 8 years. Just put it all in /home where it should have been to begin with. I also forgot to mention, this rig runs 24/7 for the most part. It's usually only off when the power has failed and my UPS is a bit low. I'll be glad when they get our new wires ran for power. They been working on it for at least a month. It's ONLY 12 miles or so. ;-) They are replacing poles, wires, hardware and everything. I been here for 40 years, I have never seen them replace all this. Bad thing is, the lights go out when they do a major switch over. I bet the lines won't be breaking so much when this is done, at least not until some nut wrecks and hits the stinking pole. :/ Thanks for the info. At least I know it won't be junk. lol Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway, when storing media files over a home network :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup...
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Daniel Troeder wrote: I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway, when storing media files over a home network :) Sounds like these drives are going to be OK then. My concern was that they would be made cheaper and not be as reliable but it seems folks are happy with them which is good. I like WD drives. The one drive I have had fail was a WD. I have a few of them so maybe it is just a bad apple or is it a lemon? Anyway. I'm getting quite a collection of videos and stuff. I'm thinking 2Tb or 3Tb. The 3Tb is more expensive but it will take longer to fill it up. Decisions. Decisions. Maybe newegg will have a BIG sale soon. While on the thread. Has anyone had any sort of luck with the recertified drives? I see them sometimes and wonder what the deal is. Are they repaired drives or just returned drives? Anyone have any experience, good or bad, with those? Thanks for the replies. Sounds good so far. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 05/09/2012 07:47 AM, Tanstaafl wrote: As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup... AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at least, it isn't supposed to. Consumer drives will acknowledge writes before they have hit the platter, even if the cache is disabled on the drive (and some consumer drives do not even allow the cache to be disabled). The only scenario this seriously guards against is unexpected power loss, where the drive has told the OS that the data has been written to disk, but it is somewhere in-between (e.g., on cache, but not on the platter) and then the power is disconnected from the unit (specifically, the drive itself). Even an unexpected reboot from the computer won't affect this, unless the computer removes power to the device during early boot (and on x86 systems, that is a virtual impossibility). --- Mike -- A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense. --- Carveth Read, “Logic” signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup... +1 I use the WD 1TB Green drive for storing video outside my machine using both USB eSATA. Works fine. Very quite, cool. Way faster than necessary for streaming movies. Nice. As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. HTH, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Am Mittwoch, 9. Mai 2012, 03:47:09 schrieb Dale: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) samsung here. Put that beast into an esata case. Sometimes I forget to turn it off, because it is so silent. And cool. The others should be similar. They are slower, yes, but fast enough to watch video. 7200 for stuff that needs some speed. 5400 for video and backups. just fine. -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 2012-05-09 8:06 AM, m...@trausch.us m...@trausch.us wrote: AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at least, it isn't supposed to. There's a bit more to it than that... http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays. But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be 'more forgiving'? Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Pandu Poluan pa...@poluan.info wrote: On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays. But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be 'more forgiving'? Rgds, Possibly. Someone with more experience with mdadm probably could do a better job but I'd never done RAID of any type at that time (I'm just a home user who taught myself whatever little I know about Linux through this list) and built this server with 5 drives to run a number of Windows VMs so I was pretty sure I wanted RAID. I bought the WD Green 1TB drives a little over 2 years ago and had multiple problems. First problem was the 4K sector size issue which was fairly new at that time, and then once I got past that I tried RAID and it still didn't work well at all. The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something silly as I remember it but I decided to cut my storage in half and replaced the 1TB Green drives with 500GB Enterprise drives. Since then I've heard of people using Green drives for RAID and doing fine but it didn't work with the ones I purchased. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something WDTLER :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something WDTLER :) Hey, I wasn't that far off! ;-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in memory = read the disc once and watch. Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400 drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. Now if someone posts that there is a bad design for some set of drives, I would avoid that. If there are people that have a unusual high failure rate then maybe an exception to the rule is needed. That's rare tho. Anyone want to buy a Yugo for full price? lol I wouldn't. For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in memory = read the disc once and watch. Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400 drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues. I got that beat a long time ago. I started out with 4Gbs originally. I found out that a 64 bit OS uses a bit more memory so, I got another 4Gbs. Then newegg had a sale on a pair of 4gb sticks and I got them. I'm at 16Gbs right now. I need to ramp up drive space to match up with my memory space. I'm maxed out on ram but I got SATA ports that are empty. We can't have that can we? lol Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Mittwoch, 9. Mai 2012, 03:47:09 schrieb Dale: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) samsung here. Put that beast into an esata case. Sometimes I forget to turn it off, because it is so silent. And cool. The others should be similar. They are slower, yes, but fast enough to watch video. 7200 for stuff that needs some speed. 5400 for video and backups. just fine. My videos and such is on a Samsung 750Gb drive now. I'm pretty sure it is a 7200rpm drive tho. My whole system is quiet. I have a Cooler Master HAF-932 case with those LARGE fans and you can't hear anything. Even if I cut everything else off in this room, I can't hear the system at all. Let's keep in mind that I am getting older tho. ;-) One reason I am considering the green drives is that I can buy a larger drive for about the same price. I use LVM so I added a 250Gb drive to the 750Gb to get 1Tb. Thing is, I'll have that full to before to long. I need to go ahead and get a large drive. Even a 2Tb drive will be about half full if I transfer it all over. Of course I'm keeping the 750Gb to tho. Here is where I am with all drives in use. /dev/mapper/data-data1 923G 619G 297G 68% /data I start looking when I get to about 70% and by 85%, I want some hardware or a plan to move things around or something. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Paul Hartman wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :) I'm about to show my age so please close your eyes. Pretty please. -_- Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. At the beginning of the curve, the thought was it could be a bad solder job, bad components or some other problem. At the other end was just when age kicked in. Sweat spot is in the middle. I try to keep these things in mind. Example. I bought a TV a couple years ago. My old TV was about 20 years old and the power supply had some sort of issue. It was either a diode getting weak or a capacitor was going bad. It had the little sine waves going up the screen. It was hard to see but was visible when the screen was all the same colour. Age was creeping up on this thing. Anyway, when my DirecTv box went out, it was years old too, I went to get me a new one. While there I saw this nice LCD TV sitting on a shelf and I might add, it looked so lonesome. lol It was marked down about half price. Hmmm, was it repaired or what? I asked a guy what the deal was. He said it was their display model. My first thought was that this could have already went through the first part of the curve. So, I asked how long it was on display. He said about 9 or 10 months. He thinks I am buying used and I'm thinking that this thing has already went through the bad part of its life. I walked out with a $800 TV for about $400. I think I got the better deal myself. Most of the drives, or other electronics, that I have either die under warranty or die when I am past caring. It has been a good long while since I had to return anything under warranty. I'm done showing my age, open your eyes again. LOL Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Mark Knecht wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark You make a good point too. I had a headlight to go out on my car once long ago. I, not thinking, replaced them both since the new ones were brighter. Guess what, when one of the bulbs blew out, the other was out VERY soon after. Now, I replace them but NOT at the same time. Keep in mind, just like a hard drive, when one headlight is on, so is the other one. When we turn our computers on, all the drives spin up together so they are basically all getting the same wear and tear effect. I don't use RAID, except to kill bugs, but that is good advice. People who do use RAID would be wise to use it. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On May 10, 2012 6:54 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :) I'm about to show my age so please close your eyes. Pretty please. -_- Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. At the beginning of the curve, the thought was it could be a bad solder job, bad components or some other problem. At the other end was just when age kicked in. Sweat spot is in the middle. I try to keep these things in mind. Example. I bought a TV a couple years ago. My old TV was about 20 years old and the power supply had some sort of issue. It was either a diode getting weak or a capacitor was going bad. It had the little sine waves going up the screen. It was hard to see but was visible when the screen was all the same colour. Age was creeping up on this thing. Anyway, when my DirecTv box went out, it was years old too, I went to get me a new one. While there I saw this nice LCD TV sitting on a shelf and I might add, it looked so lonesome. lol It was marked down about half price. Hmmm, was it repaired or what? I asked a guy what the deal was. He said it was their display model. My first thought was that this could have already went through the first part of the curve. So, I asked how long it was on display. He said about 9 or 10 months. He thinks I am buying used and I'm thinking that this thing has already went through the bad part of its life. I walked out with a $800 TV for about $400. I think I got the better deal myself. Heeey, that's a good point! Now I know that buying display units might be the best deal. Thanks, again! I'll now be keeping an eye open for such deals ;-) Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. That concept is much more general than just electronics; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
