[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Richard Faulkner]

Green as in lower power consumption, quieter and runs cooler.  So far
we've been VERY happy 
with the drive.  It's application is a stand-alone drive (no RAID) in a
XP-SP3 system dedicated to 
audio recording.  Non-server application (simple workstation only).

It would have Linux on it if it were not for the fact that the audio
card, a Digigram PCX 924 broadcast 
audio card, only operates on Window$ based drivers.  The on-board DSP is
not supported under 
ALSA or otherwise.  At least it plays nice with the Ubuntu box it shares
the n/w with for file sharing.

Rich in Lilburn


-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>
Reply-to: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
Subject: Re: [ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best
luck with?
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:11:56 -0500


Greg,

Is Green just a code color for WD, or does it actually mean "more
environmentally friendly".

I think they also have black drives, and I hope those don't mean
"hazardous to your health".

Greg



On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Greg Clifton <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Reaching back into the gray-matter archives, I recall that [some] WD drives
> had a problem, many years ago, of dropping out of RAIDs on 3Ware controllers
> due to the internal housekeeping causing latencies that resulted in the
> drive getting flagged as off line and the array as degraded. They had a
> firmware patch that solved that problem AIR and if only applied to IDE
> drives (SATA wasn't available yet).
> Obviously, you would want to turn off any "green" head parking features on
> any drive that is a member of RAID. So if you cannot make the "green" WD
> drives "UN-green" by means of some software switch, they would not be
> suitable for a RAID system. It is interesting to note that drive RPM is not
> mentioned in their specs for the green drives.
>
> GC
>
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Matty <matty91 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Richard Faulkner
>> > <rfaulkner at 34thprs.org> wrote:
>> > <snip>
>> >> Question for Greg...
>> >>
>> >> I do not have storage-fixup.conf in FC12....neither do I see it
>> >> available in
>> >> package
>> >> manager.  Where is a safe source to get it?
>> >>
>> >
>> > The official repo is:
>> >
>> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tj/storage-fixup.git
>> >
>> > And you can look through the list of problem drives by looking at:
>> >
>> >
>> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tj/storage-fixup.git;a=blob;f=storage-fixup.conf;h=711813339730325cf3ffe4b67af45c83d7f90fbc;hb=refs/heads/master
>> >
>> > Lots of drives in there, but WDC seems over represented and theirs are
>> > the only ones I've seen actually trigger application failure due to
>> > failed writes.  (the problem is the drives in this list park the heads
>> > excessively and thus can be very slow to respond to i/o activity.  If
>> > it takes too long, the kernel can error out the i/o and user space is
>> > often not prepared to handle a read or write failure gracefully.)
>> >
>> > If you have a drive in the list, then with Fedora I can't help.  (I
>> > don't know how you would cause storage-fixup to be called during boot
>> > and resume under Fedora.)
>> >
>> > (I'm surprised Fedora doesn't have this packaged.  Suse, Ubuntu, and
>> > Arch all do.)
>>
>>
>> A number of folks have also had good luck with the wdtler utility:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery
>>
>> Do you happen to know if the storage-fixup tool disables TLER on WD
>> green drives? It appears TLER causes a fair number of issues.
>>
>> - Ryan
>> --
>> http://prefetch.net
>>
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