WHS and WD Green drives?

J

JonTa

Weaksauce
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Oct 29, 2008
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My server is idling most of the day, and is being hiberante during night. Since I bought 5 WD20EADS drives last week, I would like to know if I should use wdidle3 on them? Is it worth to decrease load/park cycles over power consumption and safeness in case of power-loss situations?
 
It wouldnt really hurt to do it.
At the same time i dont really see the point.
 
The head load/unload thing to save power isnt necessarily a bad thing. It's just that the default 8 seconds is a bit too aggressive. I used the wdidle tool to set it the timeout period from 8s to 5 min instead.
 
dydx said:
The head load/unload thing to save power isnt necessarily a bad thing. It's just that the default 8 seconds is a bit too aggressive. I used the wdidle tool to set it the timeout period from 8s to 5 min instead.
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The max it will go is like 25.5 seconds, unless they have changed it.
 
Where did you read that? On a newer WD Green I was able to change it to 300 seconds. Strangely, I also have a 1 yr old WD Green where it wouldnt let me change it to 300 seconds so perhaps you are right.
 
I'm guessing WD did some testing to determine what value they set it at, and what the ramifications of that were. Why bother trying to second-guess them?
 
Hmm, Im not sure either, but would really not want to degrade drives anytime soon. As said, most of the time server is idleing and not doing much, but when I sometimes look over the disk management I see disk activity over all drives in pool (balancing drives?).
 
WHS never really lets the disk idle. Every hour it runs the drive balancer. Things are always happening in the background. For my WHS even when it's supposed to be idling, the HDD led always blinks atleast once a minute.
 
I would reccommend against green drives on WHS if you are streaming blu-ray. The demigrator runs all the time and causes me stutters with the green drives. You have to manually disable the demigrator service when watching blu-ray movies with green drives.
 
dydx said:
WHS never really lets the disk idle. Every hour it runs the drive balancer. Things are always happening in the background. For my WHS even when it's supposed to be idling, the HDD led always blinks atleast once a minute.
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Indeed, thats why I have decided to run wdidle3. But before I do, is there any risk of data loss? I have already populated the drives and would really dont like to loose anything.

Also, anything specific to watch out when patching? Can I have other drives (non WD) connected at the same time?
 
96redformula said:
I would reccommend against green drives on WHS if you are streaming blu-ray. The demigrator runs all the time and causes me stutters with the green drives. You have to manually disable the demigrator service when watching blu-ray movies with green drives.
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what is so specific about green drives that is causing troubles for you? I have 1:1 remuxes of blu-rays and streaming works without a hickup for me from wd20eads.. I just cant see anything different from other drives except aggressive 8 sec head parking, but thats why there is wdidle3..
 
I have 20-2TB green drives (a mix of Seagate, WD and Samsung) in my WHS. I don't have any problems streaming BDs to a Popcorn Hour A-110 even with DE running.
 
Depending on what WHS-functionality you guys use, isn't FreeNAS a nice alternative, if you're using WHS as some NAS-device?
 
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