hdparm + Western Digital Green "idle3"
 

I've just checked out the man page for hdparm. There I noticed the
new -J switch. It reads:

> Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout
> value. This timeout controls how often the drive parks its heads and
> enters a low power consumption state. The factory default is eight
> (8) seconds, which is a very poor choice for use with Linux. Leaving
> it at the default will result in hundreds of thousands of head
> load/unload cycles in a very short period of time. The drive
> mechanism is only rated for 300,000 to 1,000,000 cycles, so leaving
> it at the default could result in premature failure, not to mention
> the performance impact of the drive often having to wake-up before
> doing routine I/O.
>
> WD supply a WDIDLE3.EXE DOS utility for tweaking this setting, and
> you should use that program instead of hdparm if at all possible.
> The reverse-engineered implementation in hdparm is not as complete
> as the original official program, even though it does seem to work on
> at a least a few drives. [...]
>
> A setting of 30 seconds is recommended for Linux use. [...]

I've never heard of this. Are other Caviar Green users aware of this?
Anyone having any experience with this?

Thanks in advance!
Florian Philipp

hdparm + Western Digital Green "idle3"
 

On 25/08/12 15:55, Florian Philipp wrote:

I've just checked out the man page for hdparm. There I noticed the
new -J switch. It reads:


Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout
value. This timeout controls how often the drive parks its heads and
enters a low power consumption state. The factory default is eight
(8) seconds, which is a very poor choice for use with Linux. Leaving
it at the default will result in hundreds of thousands of head
load/unload cycles in a very short period of time. The drive
mechanism is only rated for 300,000 to 1,000,000 cycles, so leaving
it at the default could result in premature failure, not to mention
the performance impact of the drive often having to wake-up before
doing routine I/O.

WD supply a WDIDLE3.EXE DOS utility for tweaking this setting, and
you should use that program instead of hdparm if at all possible.
The reverse-engineered implementation in hdparm is not as complete
as the original official program, even though it does seem to work on
at a least a few drives. [...]

A setting of 30 seconds is recommended for Linux use. [...]


I've never heard of this. Are other Caviar Green users aware of this?
Anyone having any experience with this?


I have the same issue with a Seagate drive. The problem isn't just
reduced lifetime, but also an annoying high pitch sound when that
happens, and an also annoying freeze on the first disk I/O after the
heads have been parked.


The solution to this however is different; I use "-B 255" to disable
that feature entirely. Parking the heads *at all* is just brain
damaged. There's no reason at all. I don't know if the WD disks
support the -B option though.

hdparm + Western Digital Green "idle3"
 

>> I've just checked out the man page for hdparm. There I noticed the
>> new -J switch. It reads:
>>
>>> Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout
>>> value. This timeout controls how often the drive parks its heads and
>>> enters a low power consumption state. The factory default is eight
>>> (8) seconds, which is a very poor choice for use with Linux. Leaving
>>> it at the default will result in hundreds of thousands of head
>>> load/unload cycles in a very short period of time. The drive
>>> mechanism is only rated for 300,000 to 1,000,000 cycles, so leaving
>>> it at the default could result in premature failure,

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age
Always - 920472

So i'm at 920K - has anyone tried -J? Since it returns this (below) I
think i'll just leave it drive with the 8 second timer. The drive is
mirrored.

Use of -J is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
This implementation is not as thorough as the official WDIDLE3.EXE.
Use at your own risk!
Please also supply the --please-destroy-my-drive flag if you really want this.
Program aborted.