Critical Design Flaw Found in WD Caviar Green HDDs

[Sular]

Not sure if this is old news or not

 

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critical-design-flaw-found-in-wd-caviar-green-hdds.html

 

[wsume99]

Nothing new here.  Just increase or disable the IDLE3 timer if you are worried about it affecting your drive.

[kizer]

I never heard a clicking sound in unRAID with what I have.

[lionelhutz]

Good job with the scare tactics in that article.

 

I suggest you actually monitor the SMART data and use that to determine if you should do something. If the Load Cycle Count is climbing abnormally fast then decide if you want to do something. WD rates their drives for something like 300,000 LCC's but there are users with well over that and no issues and likely many other users with well over that who don't even know about it.

 

I have 3 WD drives in my unRAID box. One is climbing quicker than it should but still slowly enough I'm not spending the time to fix it and the other 2 are climbing very slowly and aren't a concern at all. So, not all drives increase the same way.

 

Peter

[wsume99]

Good job with the scare tactics in that article.

I agree.

 

On top of that I'd have to say that the simple fact that the article was just written implying this is some new discovery when in fact this is a well documented characteristic of WD green drives that dates back to mid 2009.  Thanks for the update guys - you're only ~ 2 years late. I don't think I would continue to use that site as a source for information.

[Gizmotoy]

I'm getting about 4300 LLC a month, it looks like.  At that rate, I've got 2-3 years before they reach the end of their estimated life cycle.  Probably not worth worrying about, at least in my case.

[MrD1234]

aren't media (i.e. dvd / photos / music) storage drives idle most of the time... unless people spend more than 8-10 hours in front of the idiot box.

[MortenSchmidt]

Lame article, old news.

 

I have however taken this issue kind of seriously because I have chosen to run my BT client (Transmission) and Sabnzbd on my protected array (not on the cache drive like a lot of other people), and I remember the LCC climbing quite fast when I was running that on a WD green disk. In consequence, I have moved the download folders to a Hitachi 2TB drive and I also use the same type as my Parity drive. The rest of my drives used to store media files are WD Greens.