Urgent Hard Disk Replacement (WD15EADS)

L

Lipe

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May 4, 2010
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Hi mates ! Glad to you i got my server up and running, thank you very much.

Unfortunately, after one month of use, i found out that all my WD15EADS green drivers had the "LLC Count" problem, which make their head go into parking every 8s idle.
That issue made the LLC count raise to more than 90.000 in a single month - almost 1/3 of the 350.000 lifetime certified by WD.
Read (http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=124&t=16630&start=0) (http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop...le-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731)

Theres a "workaround" for it, a WD software that sets or disables the head parking , but i dont trust on their heads anymore.
Using Desktop drivers as Enterprise is risky by itself, software-modding them sounds even worse. Maybe if i had done it at the first day.

Im looking forward to buy 6 new 1.5Tb drivers to replace them, but i dont know where to start.
Im outside-US so i dont have many options. They dont need to be green, just trustable.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Best regards
 
Green usually means less heat which usually is good for HDD reliability.

So 5400rpm high-density class would be quite good.

The EARS would have an edge with reliability due to their bigger ECC pools; it would lead to less bad sectors over time. Though that doesn't address your 'head parking' dilemma.

The new Samsung F4EG may be interesting; not sure but it may have the newer 666GB-platters which are the newest generation HDDs. Those would only be used for the 2TB drives consisting of only 3 platters, though.
 
I have a 2TB ears. I do not believe it has this 8 second park. I did not turn it off but when I last looked at the smart there were not a large amount of load cycles.
 
Did you use that disk with ZFS? I upped your older thread you linked in your first post.
 
Hi mates, thanks for the feedback.

I found some topics about WD20EARS LLC problem so yea, some of them are affected. They are much more expensive than our WD15EADS but still sound like a good option.

I couldnt find these Samsung F4EG anywhere near, only HD154UI wich looks very old. Damn South America :mad:

Still searching.
 
Know that there are two 2TB EARS versions: a 3-platter (666GB) one and 4-platter (500GB) 2TB.

The 3-platter appears to have firmware changes that increase performance considerably for small transactions.

Some interesting review:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/797-6/report-eight-2-tb-hard-drives-roundup.html

IMG0029405.png


But this addresses performance aspects, not your 'head parking' wear problem. Can't you use a utility to disable that? I heard of people who've done that, if i remember correctly.
 
Still searching : (

Asked for 6 WD20EARS quote today, no feedback yet.

Any other suggestions :confused:

Thanks in advance.
 
ah, OP, thanks for the links. it helps to explain why my WD15EADS drive sucks.
in case anyone thinks the issue is overblown, well, opening a webpage with OS loaded on that drive would often take 30 to 60 seconds.
That is the last green drive I will ever buy
 
drescherjm said:
I have a 2TB ears. I do not believe it has this 8 second park. I did not turn it off but when I last looked at the smart there were not a large amount of load cycles.
Click to expand...

I was wrong. 22000+ load cycles in less than 1 month of usage in linux. I am now trying a 5 Minute park.


jmd1 ~ # smartctl --all /dev/sde | grep -e "odel" -e"ycle" -e "Hour"
Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 395
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 174
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 193 193 000 Old_age Always - 22166
 
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Unlike the op this does not seem to be a nuisance (as I did not notice it was on) but I do not want my drive to die early because it parks the heads so often. I will test this for a while.
 
Partially off topic but I tried the WDIDLE3 tool to set various times to my WD3200BEVT in an effort to make it stop being so annoying.

Bad idea. :X When parking was disabled (btw it was actually disabled for this model, not set to 62 minutes), the head started parking again and again about 4 times a second! With the time set to 5 minutes the drive would occasionally spin down like it suddenly lost power then spin back up, freezing up anything that may have been read/writing to it.

I've set it back to 8 seconds. :eek:
 
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