[mythtvnz] Hardware Recommendations

[rob at webworxshop.com]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:34:07 +1300, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:00:23 +1300, you wrote:
>

<snip>

>>On 9/10/2011, at 2:57 PM, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:
>>
>>> Please note the WD "green" drives when in Raid or LVM extents mode 
>>> wear out the heads very quickly unless you flash a firmware hack.
>>>
>>> This is a bug to the way the drives park the heads you can see it 
>>> by the increased cycle rate on drives with smartctl... I recomend 
>>> that if you are not comfortable flashing low level vendor provided 
>>> firmware blobs to these drives that you get "something else" if you 
>>> intend to use them in any sort of always on raid setup.
>>>
>>> -JoelW
>>>
>>> On 9 October 2011 14:35, <rob at webworxshop.com> wrote:

<snip>

>
> I had that problem with one of my 2 Tbyte Caviar Black drives on my
> Windows box - it seems it can happen on any recent WD drive.  It just
> depends on how the drive is being used on that box.  What seems to
> happen is that the drive has a timeout, after which it unloads the
> heads.  It is not just the green drives that have this feature.  For
> my WD2001FASS drive, the timeout seems to have been set to around 7
> seconds.  Vista was doing something to the drive at around the same
> timing, so the drive was constantly unloading and loading the heads,
> and the SMART "193 Load/Unload Cycle Count" value was skyrocketing.
> Once I noticed the problem, I got the tool from www.wdc.com and used
> it to change the timeout value.  I first tried disabling the timeout,
> but that did not work.  So I tried again, this time setting the
> timeout to the maximum value the software allowed, ant that has cured
> the problem.  My SMART 193 value is now 299809 though, which is way
> too high for me to be confident the drive is going to last its full
> expected lifetime.  Drives are only rated for a certain number of
> load/unload cycles, and while it is not easy to find a number for a
> drive as WD do not give it in their data, the consensus seems to be
> that it will be less than 500,000 cycles, and possibly as low as
> 300,000.
>
> So I highly recommend installing SMART software before you start 
> using
> any recent WD drive, and monitoring the SMART 193 value for a couple
> of days. Smartmontools is available for most operating systems:
>
> http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
>
> Incidentally, I did not find the fix for the problem on the Internet,
> I actually called the 0800 number for WD in New Zealand, and they
> pointed me to the software to fix it.  I was surprised at how good WD
> support was - I did not get any of the usual checklist type 
> responses.
>
> This is what you need (wdidle3_1_05.zip):
>
> 
> http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en
>
> Unfortunately, it is a DOS program, so you need to find a DOS to put
> on a USB stick or CD to boot in order to be able to run it.  You also
> need to move the drive onto one of the motherboard SATA ports if it 
> is
> on a RAID card as mine was, and for safety you need to unplug all
> other drives.  There are various free DOS versions you can download,
> including CD and USB bootable images.
>
> This is the content of the wdidle3.txt file:
>

<snip>

The tool you linked to is only for the following drives: 
WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0
and advises that it should not be used with any other drive. My drives 
are WD20EARX-00PASB0. Does anyone know if these have the same problem?

If I install smartmontools and monitor the SMART 193 value, what kind 
of values am I looking for? i.e. what is 'normal' and what is 
'abnormal'.

Cheers,

Rob