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

[Gordon]

What is your B3 software version?

[vladi]

Now it's 2.6, but it did exactly the same when it was at 2.5.1.2

[Gordon]

Okay then. There was a firmware fix for the drives included in the upgrade to 2.6. To activate that fix you are supposed to halt the B3, take the power off and reconnect for a cold boot. Did you do that?

[Ubi]

maybe you should specify what you mean by 'halt' Gordon, as there is a difference between sending "shutdown -h " on the B3 and turning of the machine using the power button or web interface.

[Gordon]

I mean shutdown - power off

Whether you do this through the web interface or from the console really doesn't matter that much. The thing though with the B3 is that the power off state still leaves power on the board, so that's why you need to pull the cord on it to actually render it powerless. After reconnecting power and booting the B3 there should be a significantly lower increment on LCC and that should also eliminate the reported noise from the drive (from the parking of the heads).

Edit: Come to think about it that firmware patch should have been in the 2.5.1.2 release already, i.e. it came with the upgrade. Could it be that this patch is not executed when the B3 is loaded with a fresh install of this version?

Edit 2: Searching the release list this is actually named fixed as of version 2.4. I'm not completely certain though how to interpret what Johannes said about this: " We'll include it from 2.4 and make it run once and then die forever". Does this mean that the fix is included in every update as of 2.4 and auto-deleted every time, so that you can not run it manually if you ever swap your disk?

[Cheeseboy]

Hi Gordon,

I've had to do this manually on every new disk, both the replacement disk inside the B3 itself, and in all the new S1 disks I've bought after this "patch" was introduced.
I posted the steps a few posts up - and Ubi, you are right, shut it down properly afterwards:

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sudo /usr/lib/web-admin/backend.pl power_off

or push the button, or use the web interface. Then pull the plug - on everything - and leave it for a while.

EDIT: With "on everything" I meant the B3 unit and any external disks. I just hit the kill switch on my UPS which powers the whole setup, and leave it off for a few minutes.

[vladi]

Andddddd....it works



and after an hour



Thank you for such a simple solution

[Gordon]

Ah, indeed. I found it when running the updates today. The routine you described is in fact part of the bubba-backend package install, but is only executed if the prior software version is pre 2.4. So yes, manual running of the script is required if you have new disks or a new install. You have to remember though to do a full power cycle on the drive, which in case of the internal drive requires you to completely kill the power on the B3.

@vladi: great!

[Cheeseboy]

So perhaps topic changed to [SOLVED AGAIN], and a wiki article?

[86ivar]

almost 2.2 millions But the power on hours can not be correct...
Should I backup?

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ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f     -       7843
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027          -       8125
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032          -       114
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032          -       26630
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032          -       41
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032          -       2195558

[johannes]

So the power on hours show about 3 years of uptime if my calculating is good, is this not right?

Yes, the LCC is high, but as far as we know this is not dangerous in itself, we don't see any correlation between high LCC and failure rate, and as far as I know no one else has seen that either. It's just a value that is over the maximum specified by WD.

In any case, YES, you shuld always have a backup, also with a brand new drive.

[86ivar]

Oh you are right, I did not have my lenses on so i read 2630 or something. 26630 seems more correct for the 3 years ive had the unit yes. But what about the raw errors? I dont know much about bad sectors but if a sector turns bad, does it mean my pictures etc can get corrupted?
I have a backup yes, but only of the most important things (pictures and docs). Im not home till may so I must backup over the internet.

[86ivar]

I've successfully used the WDIDLE3 tool to disable the heads from parking (that is, set the timeout to 62 minutes).

I've tried this on two disks, a 500GB WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0 and a 2TB WDC WD20EARS.

My disk is a WD20EADS-55R6B0, did you try disabling the parking on such a disk?
I need to put the disk to a windows machine cause I have a b2. Would it be possible to run wdidle.exe if it has windows installed already, or do I have to make a bootable USB stick with windows or mayba DOSboot?

[Gordon]

You can do it from a B2

Look here

It will allow you to either completely disable the park timer or set it to a value of just over an hour. Effectively there's no difference between setting the timer to 1 minute and completely disabling it, as Squeeze/Bubba will access the disk many times within that period (which is why the LCC count is so ridiculously high on many systems). It needs to be compiled, so you'll need build-essentials installed on your B2.

There's also a bunch of information and tips you might find useful in this topic.

[86ivar]

You can do it from a B2

I tried now but when i do the make command from the instructions on the site:
$ cd idle3-tools-0.9.1
$ make

I get:

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root@b2:/home/storage/idle3-tools-0.9.1# ls
COPYING  Makefile  idle3ctl.8  idle3ctl.c  sgio.c  sgio.h
root@b2:/home/storage/idle3-tools-0.9.1/idle3-tools-0.9.1# make
cc -g -O2 -W -Wall -Wbad-function-cast -Wcast-align -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-qual -Wshadow -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -fkeep-inline-functions -Wwrite-strings -Waggregate-return -Wnested-externs -Wtrigraphs    -c -o idle3ctl.o idle3ctl.c
make: cc: Command not found
make: *** [idle3ctl.o] Error 127

Did I install the wrong make builder maybe? I have never compiled before