WD 3TB Green released

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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RoGuE
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by RoGuE » Fri Oct 22, 2010 6:40 am

truckman wrote:
RoGuE wrote:
truckman wrote: I generally nuke stuff after I watch it, but I've been getting a bit behind :roll:
I don't know about several lifetimes, but even if I was an average TV watcher (I'm well below average), I know I've got enough recorded to last me a good long time.
So that's an exaggeration..but by my calculations you've recorded (give or take) 23TB of video. Assuming that it's all in high def (probably not a safe assumption), even at 20gb/hour bit rate, you're looking at ~1160 hours of video. And, if you're a below average TV watcher and watch about 2 hours a day, it would take you 583 days of watching your recordings to catch up. And that's if you didn't watch a single new thing on TV. Doesn't it strike you as a waste of money to be storing all that?

Skirge01
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by Skirge01 » Fri Oct 22, 2010 11:32 am

Our house definitely falls into the "hoarder" category. I have 13TB on my WHS box and half of that is currently being used for video. According to SageTV, I have 1005.12 hours of video content. Where does it all go? We regularly record entire seasons or entire shows and don't get to them for quite a while. We still have yet to watch a single episode of Dollhouse, but have the entire series recorded. Then, there's 110 episodes of Babylon 5 I worked my way through and the wife is still working through, plus the movies. 112 episodes of How I Met Your Mother, which we've only watched two episodes of so far. I only just recently (past month, perhaps) started recording that particular show, BTW. It apparently airs quite often. :lol:

Needless to say, we never watch live TV. But, once we watch something, it gets deleted. I recently finished watching every episode of all 3 series of Law & Order (800+ episodes), many of which had been sitting on the server for a couple of years. I'll admit that sometimes we record a show and never go back to it and, eventually, we go and delete the whole thing. It may seem like excess storage, but one thing it saves us from is a Netflix subscription. We've never seen a need for them.

bgavin
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by bgavin » Sat Oct 23, 2010 12:28 pm

Considering the terrible reliability record of the large drives, it seems suicidal to make one of these a boot drive.
I have a 50% failure rate. At least one of every pair is DOA or otherwise defective.

Another reason to make them storage-only, is for the ability to alter/disable the spin-down time.
The factory setting is some 8 seconds, meaning this drive powers up and down constantly.

I use these drives extensively for client operations as large capacity backup drives.
The spin-down timer is disabled completely, so Windows shuts them down after X duration, set in the power GUI.
The servers backup in the wee hours, and the drive shuts down when the backup is complete.

Vicotnik
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by Vicotnik » Sat Oct 23, 2010 10:13 pm

bgavin wrote:Another reason to make them storage-only, is for the ability to alter/disable the spin-down time.
The factory setting is some 8 seconds, meaning this drive powers up and down constantly.
Spin-down and head parks are not the same thing. If the drive is storage only the head parks should not be a bother in most situations, since the drive normally isn't accessed very often.

bgavin
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by bgavin » Sun Oct 24, 2010 1:47 pm

Yes, indeed.

The 'wdidle3' utility lets the user control the head unloading timer.
The factory default is 8 seconds, which is apparently making some Linux users nuts, when the drive is used for primary storage.

Evidently Linux wakes up all drives every 10 to 30 seconds.
WD recommends changing the logging to 5 minute intervals to decrease the number of wake-up cycles.

I only have one client using a pair in RAID1 for regular data storage.
Cost and capacity were his primary requirements.
My other clients use these drives only for Backup storage, and do not radically increase the load/unload counters.

The Green thing is nit.
The huge percentage of drive failures is not.

Vicotnik
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by Vicotnik » Sun Oct 24, 2010 3:19 pm

There's a lot of FUD floating around regarding the WD GPs, as have been covered in many threads here on SPCR. As far as I know there's no apparent connection between a high load/unload count and drive failures. If someone has data regarding this I would be very happy if that person could share that with us all.

Linux does not wake up every drive every 10 to 30 seconds. That might happen to the drive the OS resides on, but certainly not all drives connected to the system. This problem is also not limited to Linux. I have little personal experience with this issue since I've never used a WD GP as an OS disk (well once, but then in a situation when the disk was constantly accessed so it never got time to park its heads).

The "green" part regards to the low power consumption, which is not nit. The high failure rates of the larger capacity drives (1.5TB and above) has little to do with the head park feature and is not limited to WD drives either. Again, if someone more informed can shed some light on this I would be grateful.

I've owned a total of seven WD10EACS, all which have worked perfectly. I've also owned a WD20EADS which broke down after a while. The failure was probably not due to the head park feature since I never used the drive in a way that it used that feature very often. Of course I realize that this is anecdotal.

Regarding the 'wdidle3' utility, WD provide a firmware update for those who want to change the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position. That's one solution. The other solution is to use software that "does not wake up the drives unnecessarily every 10 to 30 seconds or so, thereby gaining substantial power savings and eliminating superfluous activity." That's the real solution, the firmware update is just a workaround.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... 1232125802

Compddd
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by Compddd » Tue Oct 26, 2010 8:33 pm

Do you guys think WD is going to stealth introduce the 2 platter 1.5TB GP drives like they stealth introduced the 3 platter 2TB GP drives?

CA_Steve
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Re: WD 3TB Green released

Post by CA_Steve » Fri Oct 29, 2010 5:12 am

ASUS mobo's now have a software work-around for the 2GB limit.

The Tech Report has a review.

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