On Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:28:50 +0100
Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings@folkwang-hochschule.de> wrote:
> On 12/23/2010 09:15 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
> > 1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the
> > power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge
> > impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion
> > on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think.
> >
> > 2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that
> > they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem
> > under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this
> > point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main
> > system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2
> > minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000
> > head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec.
> >
> > 30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks.
> >
> > Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up
> > all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year.
> >
> > Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old
> > and it's approaching end-of-life?
>
> in a 24/7 machine, you must switch of the parking behaviour in the
> firmware, which is only possible with an arcane MS-DOS flash tool that
> requires a freedos image to use (luckily, it can boot off a usb stick,
> so you don't have to install a floppy).
Where the mentioned firmware can be found? I found nothing with a quick search on the WD website. (Unfortunately I bought one of those 'Green' drives just recently)
JR
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Received on Fri Dec 24 20:15:03 2010
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