[SOLVED] [Old] WD Green Power drives may kill themselves !!

[rewien]

some info i found about the load cycles:

Affected Models:
WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0

Problem
The Load/Unload counter for S.M.A.R.T ATTRIBUTE 193 continues to increase for the following drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.

Symptom:
WD drives are designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. WD defines this mode as Idle 3.

Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digital’s RE2GP, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles.

Solution:
The number of systems using such applications and utilities is limited and customers can resolve this symptom by optimizing their systems to not wake up the drives unnecessarily every 10 to 30 seconds or so, thereby gaining substantial power savings and eliminating superfluous activity.

Most customers, when made aware of the unnecessary activity caused by their systems, have modified their utility, operating systems, or applications to take advantage of Western Digital's advanced power-saving mode. Other customers have requested a utility (See link below) to modify the behavior of the drive to wait longer before invoking Idle 3 mode. Although such a change eliminates significant power savings during periods of inactivity. This update is described in WD's Process Change Notice PCN 2579-701324-A02 (see attached PDF file).
Please click on this link, RE2GP Idle Mode Update Utility, to download the utility.

NOTE: The update also supports a low-power spin-up feature optimized for highly energy efficient, large scale storage applications, which is enabled using a utility, WDSpinUp Utility, also available at the RE2GP Download page.

hmm as i can read the manufacture is asking us to optimize bubba.

about the load cycle i found this:

I have the WD GP 500 gb as well. Device Model: WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0

Monitoring the HD over 13 minutes recorded a Load_Cycle_Count increase by 28. All
mount points are mounted with noatime,nodiratime in the fstab.

So, a little over 2 times per minute. Assuming the 600000 cycles mentioned in this thread, this gives it a lifetime of around 193 days of continuous uptime. read more:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunt ... mments/431

All the solutions tried but failed read more: http://www.synology.com/enu/forum/viewt ... 653#p49019

I'm afraid that excito had to optimize bubbatwo to solve this.

Rewien

ps; Thanks Johannes for your quick reply[/url]

[bervan]

I want to check my B2 and trying to install smartctl
What am i doing wrong here? everything is up to date.

sudo apt-get install smartctl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package smartctl

?

Bert

[rewien]

I want to check my B2 and trying to install smartctl
What am i doing wrong here? everything is up to date.

sudo apt-get install smartctl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package smartctl

?

Bert

Hello Bert,

You should have done:

Code: Select all

apt-get install smartmontools 

Here's the how to link:http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?t=697

[Eek]

apt-get install smartmontools

Mine looks to be fine

$ date; smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | grep -i -E '(load_cycle|temp|Power_On_Hours|Device Model)'
Sun Feb 8 11:29:19 CET 2009
Device Model: WDC WD10EACS-00D6B0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 2992
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 19
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 105 102 000 Old_age Always - 45

[Xet]

After 124 days, mine look fairly good too....

Device Model: WDC WD10EACS-65D6B0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 10
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 3425
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 10
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 106 104 000 Old_age Always - 44

[trencarbe]

Here's my statistics:

Code: Select all

bubba:/home/blob# date; smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | grep -i -E '(load_cycle|temp|Power_On_Hours|Device Model)'
Sun Feb  8 15:53:10 UTC 2009
Device Model:     WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       2514
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   150   150   000    Old_age   Always       -       150785
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   106   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       46

[joost]

My 2 cents of statistics:

Code: Select all

Device Model:     WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -            1458
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   176   176   000    Old_age   Always       -            73965
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   110   106   000    Old_age   Always       -            42

[matse]

Oh shit...

Code: Select all

Sun Feb  8 22:13:41 UTC 2009
Device Model:     WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       2196
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       309602
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   102   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       45

[rewien]

All you guy's with high cycles i suggest using this script:

PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 1:36 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
Have tested whilbone's testscript ( see below ) tonight, and as hoped it stopped the disk from going to idle 3 and in this way avoided the load cycles and the tempature was also stable, so the workaround works for the time beeing . . .

Code:
while [ true ];do
sleep 5
tail /var/log/messages >NUL
done


I am happy the Excito teams takes the isue serious and works on a solution, because they are probably the ones with the most insight in the system.

it stops de cycles from increasing and saves youre disk

I use it now

Rewien

[trencarbe]

Rewien: After you run that script, have you noticed any increase in HD temperature? (or anything else unusal, for that matter...)

[jws]

Device Model: WDC WD5000AACS-00G8B0
Serial Number: WD-WCAUF1222423

Code: Select all

  4 Start_Stop_Count     0x0032  100   100  000  Old_age  Always   -  133
  9 Power_On_Hours       0x0032  097   097  000  Old_age  Always   - 2625
193 Load_Cycle_Count     0x0032  200   200  000  Old_age  Always   -  133
194 Temperature_Celsius  0x0022  109   104  000  Old_age  Always   -   38

[Ton]

Is it known which processes/programs are writing to the disk so frequently and does anybody know if there is a way to find out which are the writing processes ?

Because when it is just system logging, I could live with switching it off or creating a tmpfs where the files lie in RAM, causing no hdd writes, disadvantage is that the files gone after a reboot.
I also read in a forum ( unfortunately not know which ) that the hdd SMART temrature measuring deamon was the one waking up the disk for it's readout, could this be the wake up process ?

[novis]

Code: Select all

Mon Feb  9 16:25:01 EET 2009
Device Model:     WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       3586
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   123   123   000    Old_age   Always       -       232927
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   104   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       43

So, what... I can expect my hd to implode sooner rather than later? :/

[rewien]

Rewien: After you run that script, have you noticed any increase in HD temperature? (or anything else unusal, for that matter...)

I'm running the script on my bubbatwo almost 2 days now, everything seems normal, temperature is stable and the cycles are not decreasing anymore.

This is one way to save youre disk, it's sad to have payed so much money for a disk with a such a short life time now.

[johannes]

Good that this solution seems to stop the load cycle count increase.

rewien: Since the cycle count increase has stopped, your disk should be safe now.

and others: We (Excito) are still awaiting an official response from Western Digital on how to best handle this. We'll let you know once we know more.