[mythtvnz] Hardware Recommendations

[rob at webworxshop.com]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:46:54 +1300, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:00:30 +1300, you wrote:
>
> [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'.
>
> The drive I had a problem with is a WD2001FASS-00W2B0.  I am pretty
> sure that the WD support person I talked to said to use that tool to
> fix the problem, and it did work.  The Disable option did not though 
> -
> I had to just set the timeout to the maximum possible value.
>
> On that drive, the raw value for 193 now reads 2999834!  If you see
> the raw 193 value increasing all the time (that means from minute to
> minute), you have the problem.  Normally, for a new drive, the raw 
> 193
> value should be close to 0.  It will occasionally increment, 
> depending
> on the circumstances.  The other three WD drives on that box have raw
> 193 values of 90, 9 and 1633, the latter being the oldest drive.  On
> my Linux MythTV box, the WD drives report 16 and 48.
>

I checked my drives yesterday after a couple of days constant operation 
and found fairly alarming raw 193 values of ~400 for both drives. After 
a bit of fiddling around and googling I found an image of Ulimate Boot 
CD which contains the wdidle3 utility [0].

I booted that up and followed the instructions. I initally tried the 
disable option, which appeared to work (at least wdidle3 reported that 
it worked). Upon reboot I found the system to be very slow and checking 
the raw 193 values again showed them to be incrementing several times a 
second!!! Setting the timeout to 300 seconds fixed this and now the 
values appear to be pretty stable at around 800.

LET THIS MESSAGE BE A WARNING TO ANYONE WITH THESE DRIVES 
(WD20EARX-00PASB0) - DO NOT USE THE WDIDLE3 DISABLE OPTION, IT WILL KILL 
YOUR DRIVES VERY QUICKLY!

Thanks for the heads up on this issue.

Cheers,

Rob

[0] http://www.jzab.de/content/ultimate-boot-cd-wdidle3-util-included