[Tfug] WD "green"

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Harry,

On 2/21/2014 11:22 PM, Harry McGregor wrote:
> There are some known issues with the WD Green line.
>
> In many releases the firmware is too eager to spin down the drive for
> power savings.  There are some utilities to run that can "fix" the
> firmware setting.

Hmmm... the incident that caused me to finally pull the drive was
a file system check immediately after power up (having powered the
box down in an orderly fashion, before -- why it feels necessary to
fsck *both* drives after they are presumably marked "clean" is a
mystery to me!  Especially when the drives haven't been *written*
to in months!).  The box was obviously struggling -- WWW interface
was unresponsive, etc.

Pulled the plug, pulled the drive, restarted and the box came up
immediately -- and didn't even *think* about fsck'ing the second
(now *sole*) drive!

[I've started a brute force file compare with a backup of the
archive just to hammer on it for a while and see how it fares]

> That being said, I don't see many of them, as I don't use them myself.
> If I need a low speed bulk drive, I try and use the HGST 5K series (now
> owned by WD).
>
> I have friends that have had>50% failure rates on the WD greens over
> the course of 3 years with default configuration.

Yikes!

> Also a lot of the green drives are 4K "Advanced format" drives, that
> require you to be extra careful on your partition alignment.

As this is in an appliance, I don't have any say over how the
drive is partitioned (presumably a single partition as the software
appears to reside in FLASH and not on the drive).  But, it had
been working in the past (flakey behavior of the NAS started a
month or so ago -- note I don't keep the box "up" unless it is
in use).

Note that the *contents* have never been corrupted.  Just the box
as a whole behaves in a degraded fashion when the drive (was)
installed.

<frown>

I'll let it run overnight and see if it's still "up" tomorrow.
Previously, I couldn't get a full 24 hours of uptime without
it hanging (unresponsive)

[Find a time when we can get together so I can start playing with
those other options!]