[mythtvnz] Hardware Recommendations

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:00:23 +1300, you wrote:

>I am thinking of getting some of their drives right now, can you provide more details on the drive and the firmware?
>Cheers
>Douglas.
>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:
>> Hi Everyone,
>> 
>> Thanks for all the hardware recommendations. For those that suggested
>> setting up separate back end and front end systems, unfortunately this
>> isn't an option at the moment as the amount of re-wiring required
>> probably wouldn't be appreciated by my landlords.
>> 
>> Based on the requirements of myth, I'm now not considering a quad core,
>> which will save me a considerable amount of power. The CPU I'm
>> considering is the AMD A6 3500 [0]. I haven't made a decision on a
>> motherboard yet and I'll be looking for a fanless graphics card which
>> can do VDPAU (it doesn't need to do much more than that). I also have a
>> case in mind [1].
>> 
>> In terms of storage, the recommended green drives have been my
>> preferred drive since they came out. I've always used Western Digital
>> drives and have never had a problem with them. I'm probably going to set
>> up a RAID 1 setup with 2x2TB drives just in case though.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Rob

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:

/=============================================================================
//
// Copyright 2005-2009 Western Digital Corporation
//
// RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND
// ------------------------
//
// Use, duplication or disclosure by any commercial industry (public
// or private), private individual or by any Government Agency without
// an expressed written consent of release from Western Digital
// Corporation is subject to restriction set forth in paragraph
// (b)(3)(B) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software
// clause in DAR 7-104.9(a).
//
// Manufacturer is:
//
// Western Digital Corporation
//   20511 Lake Forest Dr.
//   Lake Forest, CA 92630
//   1-800-275-4932
//=============================================================================

WDIDLE3 Version 1.05 for DOS


DESCRIPTION
- DOS Level utility to setup or report the idle3 value.


FEATURES
- Scan for all drives. Non-WD Drives shall only show the model and
serial
  numbers.
- Uses a Vendor Specific Command to set or get the idle3 timer.
- Timer can be set from 8 to 25.5 seconds on older drives.
- Timer can be set from 8 to 300 seconds on newer drives.


USAGE
WDIDLE3 [/S[<Timer>]] [/D] [/R] [/?]
where:
/S[<Timer>] Set timer, units in seconds. Default=8.0 (8.0 seconds).
            Resolution is 0.1 seconds from 8.0 to 12.7 seconds.
            Resolution is 30 seconds from 30 seconds to 300 seconds.
            Note, times between 12.8 and 30 seconds will be set to 30
seconds.
/D          Disable timer.
/R          Report current timer.
/?          This help info.

DOS ERRORLEVEL
0     No error
1     Drive problem
254   Internal program error
255   Invalid command line argument