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Are those "green" drives any good?

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rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 1:47 AM

Post #1 of 51 (561 views)
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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"

alan.mckinnon at gmail

May 9, 2012, 2:25 AM

Post #2 of 51 (552 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500
Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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.mckinnon [at] gmail

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 2:52 AM

Post #3 of 51 (549 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500
> Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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.
Weeeeee!!

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"

daniel at admin-box

May 9, 2012, 4:32 AM

Post #4 of 51 (542 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 :)

tanstaafl at libertytrek

May 9, 2012, 4:47 AM

Post #5 of 51 (542 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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...

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 4:51 AM

Post #6 of 51 (543 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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"

mike at trausch

May 9, 2012, 5:06 AM

Post #7 of 51 (544 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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�

Attachments:

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markknecht at gmail

May 9, 2012, 5:29 AM

Post #8 of 51 (545 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl <tanstaafl [at] libertytrek> wrote:
> On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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

volkerarmin at googlemail

May 9, 2012, 6:15 AM

Post #9 of 51 (544 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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

tanstaafl at libertytrek

May 9, 2012, 6:30 AM

Post #10 of 51 (541 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On 2012-05-09 8:06 AM, mike [at] trausch <mike [at] trausch> 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

pandu at poluan

May 9, 2012, 9:39 AM

Post #11 of 51 (537 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht [at] gmail> 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,

markknecht at gmail

May 9, 2012, 10:28 AM

Post #12 of 51 (533 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu [at] poluan> wrote:
>
> On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht [at] gmail> 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

paul.hartman+gentoo at gmail

May 9, 2012, 11:42 AM

Post #13 of 51 (536 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> wrote:
> The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from
> WD called something like wdtwiddle or something

WDTLER :)

markknecht at gmail

May 9, 2012, 11:53 AM

Post #14 of 51 (535 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> 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! ;-)

alan.mckinnon at gmail

May 9, 2012, 2:28 PM

Post #15 of 51 (538 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500
Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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.
> Weeeeee!!

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.mckinnon [at] gmail

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 3:24 PM

Post #16 of 51 (532 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500
> Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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.
>> Weeeeee!!
>
> 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 sooooo 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"

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 3:37 PM

Post #17 of 51 (527 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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"

paul.hartman+gentoo at gmail

May 9, 2012, 3:48 PM

Post #18 of 51 (530 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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. :)

markknecht at gmail

May 9, 2012, 4:37 PM

Post #19 of 51 (530 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 sooooo 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

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 4:49 PM

Post #20 of 51 (530 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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"

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 4:58 PM

Post #21 of 51 (532 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 sooooo 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"

pandu at poluan

May 9, 2012, 6:39 PM

Post #22 of 51 (530 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On May 10, 2012 6:54 AM, "Dale" <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> wrote:
>
> Paul Hartman wrote:
> > On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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,

adamcarter3 at gmail

May 9, 2012, 6:52 PM

Post #23 of 51 (527 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

>> 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

michaelkintzios at gmail

May 10, 2012, 12:03 AM

Post #24 of 51 (526 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thursday 10 May 2012 00:58:47 Dale wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> > On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 sooooo 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

Attachments:

signature.asc (0.19 KB)

napalm at squareownz

May 10, 2012, 4:55 AM

Post #25 of 51 (528 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 sooooo 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`!

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 10, 2012, 5:38 AM

Post #26 of 51 (173 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

napalm [at] squareownz 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 <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 sooooo 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"

tsg at bonedaddy

May 10, 2012, 5:53 AM

Post #27 of 51 (169 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

* Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> [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

napalm at squareownz

May 10, 2012, 6:27 AM

Post #28 of 51 (170 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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!

invasivenorman at gmail

May 10, 2012, 9:20 AM

Post #29 of 51 (170 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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.

markknecht at gmail

May 10, 2012, 11:01 AM

Post #30 of 51 (177 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
<invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 300000 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 200 200 051 Pre-fail
Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 131 128 021 Pre-fail
Always - 6441
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 65
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail
Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 074 074 000 Old_age
Always - 19316
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age
Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age
Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 63
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 14
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age
Always - 700488
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 120 113 000 Old_age
Always - 27
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age
Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age
Offline - 0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining
LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 11655 -
# 2 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 8797 -
# 3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 8794 -
# 4 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 1009 -
# 5 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 388 -
# 6 Short offline Completed without error 00% 376 -

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

gandalf ~ #

invasivenorman at gmail

May 10, 2012, 11:13 AM

Post #31 of 51 (171 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
> <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
>> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 300000 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 >400000. 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.

markknecht at gmail

May 10, 2012, 11:51 AM

Post #32 of 51 (175 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Norman Invasion
<invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
>> <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
>>> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 300000 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 >400000. 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 > 700000!

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
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 9480) 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: ( 112) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x303f) SCT Status supported.
SCT Error Recovery Control
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 200 200 051 Pre-fail
Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 239 235 021 Pre-fail
Always - 1050
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 935
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail
Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 091 091 000 Old_age
Always - 7281
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 933
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 27
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 907
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 106 086 000 Old_age
Always - 41
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age
Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age
Offline - 0

gentoo at dhaller

May 10, 2012, 12:24 PM

Post #33 of 51 (171 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

Hello,

On Thu, 10 May 2012, Mark Knecht wrote:
>On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
><invasivenorman [at] gmail> 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

gentoo at dhaller

May 10, 2012, 12:36 PM

Post #34 of 51 (185 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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

gentoo at dhaller

May 10, 2012, 12:38 PM

Post #35 of 51 (172 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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

gentoo at dhaller

May 10, 2012, 12:39 PM

Post #36 of 51 (172 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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

markknecht at gmail

May 10, 2012, 1:17 PM

Post #37 of 51 (171 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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

alan.mckinnon at gmail

May 10, 2012, 2:13 PM

Post #38 of 51 (175 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, 10 May 2012 21:38:20 +0200
David Haller <gentoo [at] dhaller> 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.mckinnon [at] gmail

neil at digimed

May 10, 2012, 2:25 PM

Post #39 of 51 (170 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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.

Attachments:

signature.asc (0.19 KB)

rdalek1967 at gmail

May 10, 2012, 2:39 PM

Post #40 of 51 (171 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

napalm [at] squareownz 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"

paul.hartman+gentoo at gmail

May 10, 2012, 3:53 PM

Post #41 of 51 (174 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 6:55 AM, <napalm [at] squareownz> 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)."

neil at digimed

May 10, 2012, 5:07 PM

Post #42 of 51 (174 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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

Attachments:

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gentoo at dhaller

May 10, 2012, 6:10 PM

Post #43 of 51 (206 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 awaaaaay!
Informal advice to users at Karolinska Institutet, 1993-1994

billk at iinet

May 10, 2012, 6:15 PM

Post #44 of 51 (173 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 12:20 -0400, Norman Invasion wrote:
> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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

michaelkintzios at gmail

May 12, 2012, 2:34 AM

Post #45 of 51 (154 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thursday 10 May 2012 19:51:14 Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Norman Invasion
>
> <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> > On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> wrote:
> >> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
> >>
> >> <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> >>> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 300000 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 >400000. 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 > 700000!
>
> 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 been run.
> Total time to complete Offline
> data collection: ( 9480) 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: ( 112) minutes.
> Conveyance self-test routine
> recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
> SCT capabilities: (0x303f) SCT Status supported.
> SCT Error Recovery Control
> 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 200 200 051 Pre-fail
> Always - 0
> 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 239 235 021 Pre-fail
> Always - 1050
> 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> Always - 935
> 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail
> Always - 0
> 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 091 091 000 Old_age
> Always - 7281
> 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> Always - 933
> 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 27
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 907
> 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 106 086 000 Old_age
> Always - 41
> 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age
> Offline - 0
> 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> Always - 0
> 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age
> Offline - 0

Is this 193 Load_Cycle_Count an issue only on the green drives?

I have a very old Compaq laptop here that shows:

# smartctl -A /dev/sda | egrep "Power_On|Load_Cycle"
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 055 055 000 Old_age Always
- 19830
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 001 001 000 Old_age Always
- 1739734

Admittedly, there are some 60 errors on it (having been used extensively on
bouncy trains, buses, aeroplanes, etc) but it is still refusing to die ...
O_O

It is a Hitachi 20G

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 80GN
Device Model: IC25N020ATMR04-0
Serial Number: MRX107K1DS623H
Firmware Version: MO1OAD5A
User Capacity: 20,003,880,960 bytes [20.0 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 6
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a
Local Time is: Sat May 12 10:30:13 2012 BST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

--
Regards,
Mick

Attachments:

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volkerarmin at googlemail

May 12, 2012, 2:49 AM

Post #46 of 51 (155 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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
> >
> > <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> > > On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markknecht [at] gmail> wrote:
> > >> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
> > >>
> > >> <invasivenorman [at] gmail> wrote:
> > >>> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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 300000 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 >400000. 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 > 700000!
> >
> > 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 been run.
> > Total time to complete Offline
> > data collection: ( 9480) 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: ( 112) minutes.
> > Conveyance self-test routine
> > recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
> > SCT capabilities: (0x303f) SCT Status supported.
> >
> > SCT Error Recovery Control
> >
> > 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 200 200 051 Pre-fail
> >
> > Always - 0
> >
> > 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 239 235 021 Pre-fail
> >
> > Always - 1050
> >
> > 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 935
> >
> > 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail
> >
> > Always - 0
> >
> > 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 0
> >
> > 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 091 091 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 7281
> >
> > 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 0
> >
> > 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 0
> >
> > 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age
> >
> > Always - 933
> > 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Always - 27
> > 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Always - 907
> > 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 106 086 000 Old_age
> > Always - 41
> > 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Always - 0
> > 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Always - 0
> > 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Offline - 0
> > 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Always - 0
> > 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age
> > Offline - 0
>
> Is this 193 Load_Cycle_Count an issue only on the green drives?
>
> I have a very old Compaq laptop here that shows:
>
> # smartctl -A /dev/sda | egrep "Power_On|Load_Cycle"
> 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 055 055 000 Old_age Always
> - 19830
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 001 001 000 Old_age Always
> - 1739734
>
> Admittedly, there are some 60 errors on it (having been used extensively on
> bouncy trains, buses, aeroplanes, etc) but it is still refusing to die ...
> O_O
>
> It is a Hitachi 20G
>
> === START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
> Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 80GN
> Device Model: IC25N020ATMR04-0
> Serial Number: MRX107K1DS623H
> Firmware Version: MO1OAD5A
> User Capacity: 20,003,880,960 bytes [20.0 GB]
> Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
> Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
> ATA Version is: 6
> ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a
> Local Time is: Sat May 12 10:30:13 2012 BST
> SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
> SMART support is: Enabled
>
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

SAMSUNG HD502IJ
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 085 085 011 Pre-fail Always
- 5480
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always
- 1864
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always
- 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0025 100 100 015 Pre-fail Offline -
10814
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always
- 20178
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always
- 1854
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 8
184 End-to-End_Error 0x0033 100 100 099 Pre-fail Always
- 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 082 065 000 Old_age Always
- 18 (Min/Max 13/18)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 079 061 000 Old_age Always
- 21 (Min/Max 13/21)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 2587
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline -
0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 253 000 Old_age Always
- 0

SAMSUNG HD753LJ:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 075 075 011 Pre-fail Always
- 8330
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always
- 1399
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always
- 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0025 100 100 015 Pre-fail Offline -
10041
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 097 097 000 Old_age Always
- 16941
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always
- 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always
- 1397
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0x000e 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
184 End-to-End_Error 0x0033 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always
- 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 081 065 000 Old_age Always
- 19 (Min/Max 12/19)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 077 064 000 Old_age Always
- 23 (Min/Max 12/23)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 1412
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline -
0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always
- 0
201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 253 000 Old_age Always
- 0

i have some more disks, but those clocked the most hours.

--
#163933

Warp_7 at gmx

May 12, 2012, 11:50 AM

Post #47 of 51 (150 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:20:57PM -0400, Norman Invasion wrote:
> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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
--
Gru� | 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.

gentoo at dhaller

May 13, 2012, 2:35 AM

Post #48 of 51 (148 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 055 055 000 Old_age Always
>- 19830
>193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 001 001 000 Old_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!

gentoo at dhaller

May 13, 2012, 2:38 AM

Post #49 of 51 (158 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 <rdalek1967 [at] gmail> 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

Warp_7 at gmx

May 21, 2012, 2:05 PM

Post #50 of 51 (137 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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.

sixgod at gmail

May 21, 2012, 3:44 PM

Post #51 of 51 (54 views)
Permalink

Re: Are those "green" drives any good? [In reply to]

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 <Warp_7 [at] gmx> 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.
> --
> Gru� | 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.
>

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