4 ms·

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had to

by pedrocr 13y ago

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

toyg 13y ago
My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.
- pedrocr 13y ago
  Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?
  - jzwinck 13y ago
    Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      WD's marketroids tried very hard to give people that impression, but it's false. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771438.pdf http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771... At the very bottom, in small, grey text, you'll find "IntelliPower" defined as: "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each WD Green drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."
  - cnvogel 13y ago
    The host can spin down a drive manually, but most often it's done autonomously be the drive. ‣ In Linux you can manually ... • check the power state of your drive using: hdparm -C /dev/sda • manually spin down the drive (standby) using: hdparm -y /dev/sda (it will immediately spin up at the first attempt to read a sector) ‣ Or you configure the automatic standby of the drive (which also does not involve the OS)... • hdparm -S n /dev/sda will configure the timeout of the drive to a value encoding the time to spin-down on a non-linear scale, check the manpage • hdparm -B n /dev/sda will configure another type of power management which doesn't specify a fixed timeout, but rather a vendor-defined type of arbitrary power saving measures on a scale of 1..254 (1: waste power, 254: conserve power, n>128 allows spin down) The latter two options are handled internally by the drive and (as far as I know) even stored non-volatile. http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (Edit: fixed my broken English ;-) )
    - Filligree 13y ago
      So, actually you got -B backwards. n < 128 allows spin-down.
jws 13y ago
Greens have had problems with aggressive head parking. If you have an idle set of them you can go through their design limit of head parks in a couple of months and start to get failures shortly after. Done that. Check your S.M.A.R.T data. Look at the head park number. (Load cycles I think it is called, can't look it up now). If it is a six digit number, you are in trouble. For a server you want if to be in the same order as to power ups. Anything else and you have to explain to yourself "why?" Edit: adding. The 1TB and smaller greens were disasters. I ruined a lot of them. I was told all of the 2TB and up greens didn't have head park issues, but spent part of last week replacing a storage unit populated with 2TB greens when a spindle failed (>200 unrecoverable blocks) and found that some of the 2TB greens were load cycling into the 200000 range, others weren't running up. They were all identical models purchased at the same time. Maybe they had different firmware? I replaced hem with REDs. They aren't supposed to park and they won't try to recover a bad sector for more than a few seconds so the don't hang your RAID when they get bad sectors.
- mikevm 13y ago
  This might be anecdotal but external WD (MyLife) drives are usually from the Green series and I had 2 different ones fail on me after about 1 year of use. Same happened to 2 friends of mine. I blamed it on the constant head parking (it went idle after 10 minutes of unuse).
  - rdc12 13y ago
    I have 4 WD greens, one from an external enclosure the others being internal drivers, the first being maybe 3 years old now, all still going fine, also anecdotal
- nisa 13y ago
  As someone who inherited 240 24/7 running WD-Greens: http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ works fine but disabling the timer has negative performance impact. 3000 seconds is fine through. But you need a complete powercycle before the changes take effect. No more parking. Does make a difference in longevity in my not very scientific opinion. I can second the 200> bad blocks. Sometimes they still work fine after using badblocks -w a few times on them and raising the timer.

by pedrocr 13y ago

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

toyg 13y ago

My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.

pedrocr 13y ago
Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?
- jzwinck 13y ago
  Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    WD's marketroids tried very hard to give people that impression, but it's false. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771438.pdf http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771... At the very bottom, in small, grey text, you'll find "IntelliPower" defined as: "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each WD Green drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."
- cnvogel 13y ago
  The host can spin down a drive manually, but most often it's done autonomously be the drive. ‣ In Linux you can manually ... • check the power state of your drive using: hdparm -C /dev/sda • manually spin down the drive (standby) using: hdparm -y /dev/sda (it will immediately spin up at the first attempt to read a sector) ‣ Or you configure the automatic standby of the drive (which also does not involve the OS)... • hdparm -S n /dev/sda will configure the timeout of the drive to a value encoding the time to spin-down on a non-linear scale, check the manpage • hdparm -B n /dev/sda will configure another type of power management which doesn't specify a fixed timeout, but rather a vendor-defined type of arbitrary power saving measures on a scale of 1..254 (1: waste power, 254: conserve power, n>128 allows spin down) The latter two options are handled internally by the drive and (as far as I know) even stored non-volatile. http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (Edit: fixed my broken English ;-) )
  - Filligree 13y ago
    So, actually you got -B backwards. n < 128 allows spin-down.

jws 13y ago

Greens have had problems with aggressive head parking. If you have an idle set of them you can go through their design limit of head parks in a couple of months and start to get failures shortly after. Done that. Check your S.M.A.R.T data. Look at the head park number. (Load cycles I think it is called, can't look it up now). If it is a six digit number, you are in trouble. For a server you want if to be in the same order as to power ups. Anything else and you have to explain to yourself "why?" Edit: adding. The 1TB and smaller greens were disasters. I ruined a lot of them. I was told all of the 2TB and up greens didn't have head park issues, but spent part of last week replacing a storage unit populated with 2TB greens when a spindle failed (>200 unrecoverable blocks) and found that some of the 2TB greens were load cycling into the 200000 range, others weren't running up. They were all identical models purchased at the same time. Maybe they had different firmware? I replaced hem with REDs. They aren't supposed to park and they won't try to recover a bad sector for more than a few seconds so the don't hang your RAID when they get bad sectors.

mikevm 13y ago
This might be anecdotal but external WD (MyLife) drives are usually from the Green series and I had 2 different ones fail on me after about 1 year of use. Same happened to 2 friends of mine. I blamed it on the constant head parking (it went idle after 10 minutes of unuse).
- rdc12 13y ago
  I have 4 WD greens, one from an external enclosure the others being internal drivers, the first being maybe 3 years old now, all still going fine, also anecdotal
nisa 13y ago
As someone who inherited 240 24/7 running WD-Greens: http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ works fine but disabling the timer has negative performance impact. 3000 seconds is fine through. But you need a complete powercycle before the changes take effect. No more parking. Does make a difference in longevity in my not very scientific opinion. I can second the 200> bad blocks. Sometimes they still work fine after using badblocks -w a few times on them and raising the timer.