Public bug reported: On a Dell E5420 I noticed the HDD is constantly spinning up/down. The drive is a WDC2500BEVT-7 which is apparently a "green" WD HDD which has firmware magic called "Intelli-Park" to park the HDD to save power.. Apparently the default settings it parks the heads after 8 seconds of inactivity and with a lifetime of ~1,000,000 Load_Cycle_Counts we may see these drives fail sooner than expected.
I was easily able to get the HDD to bump the Load_Cycle_Count by at least ~4 in 60 seconds, which equates to ~700,000 in a year assuming we use the HDD for 8 hours a day. The lifetime is ~1,000,000 Load_Cycle_Counts, so this is a bit alarming to say the least. This happens even with hdparm -B 128 /dev/sda; I was under the impression that values > 127 *should* not permit spin down, but looks like this drive needs -B 255 for stop this. So I think we have a green drive that tries too hard and will end up shortening its life. There is some discussion of this here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51401 And some explanation from WD about the issue here: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5357 This may affect the following models: WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS Can we quirk on these drives to select a more appropriate default hdparm setting? ** Affects: hdparm (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Assignee: Steve Langasek (vorlon) Status: New ** Changed in: hdparm (Ubuntu) Assignee: (unassigned) => Steve Langasek (vorlon) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/969165 Title: hdparm: excessive Load_Cycle_Count with some WD "Intelli-Park" HDDs To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hdparm/+bug/969165/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
