WD drives and autoparking


Recommended Posts

Im sure this has been asked many times before but this is solely in relation to WD green drives, EARX to be exact.

 

Ive read this recently:

 

It turns out there’s a rather nasty issue concerning Western Digital’s Green Power drives has come to light. As part of the power saving measures the drive’s firmware parks the heads, which is fine in principle that is until you realise that it does this every 8 seconds. What’s worse is that the drives have a maximum load count of 300,000 before the drive mechanism becomes prone to failure. Now you might be wondering “what is so bad about that..?”, well based on the heads being parked every 8 seconds which is equivalent to 29 times each hour your drive should be toast in just over 3 months with continuous usage. Not good for a media server.

 

Three months a drive is a joke. Does anyone experience drive failure like this?

 

This is the supposed solution to the problem:

Thankfully this issue can be fixed by downloading and running the wdidle3 utility from a bootable CD. Once you’ve booted your server just type in “wdidle3.exe /d” and the utility will scan all your drives and disable intellipark on the Western Digital drives. It’s not a pretty fix, but it is reported to do the job

 

You can adjust the autopark timer from the default 8 sec up to a maximum of 300 seconds (5 minutes).

 

Im in the process of building my unraid server, I have 3 x 2tb EARX drives so want  to know before installing them is this problem still prevalent?

 

EDIT: According to Western Digital, the following models are affected: WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS and WD7501AYPS...............Seems like im ok.

I still want to find the time between EARX autoparks though. If it can be put to 300 secs would it be worth it?

 

Ps. Whats your number one tip for a new unraid setup by a n00b (besides reading the wiki 5 times  ;))

Link to comment

The "nasty issue" only exists when the drive is used outside design parameters. For servers, which these drives are not made for servers, the 8 seconds is very short, but for a secondary storage (possible external) 8 seconds is really not bad.

 

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/Optimal-WDIDLE3-Setting-For-WD20EARS-Hard-Drives/td-p/48323

 

Evaluate your drive, check if it is parking at 8 seconds or some other value, change if needed.

 

 

Link to comment

Scare tactics. The heads only park again in 8 seconds if they're not parked already. I have a WD15EADS and it has something like 25k hours and somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 LCC. It'd take around 6 years for this drive to reach 300,000.

 

Monitor the LCC count in the SMART reports of the drive. If you notice it climbing abnormally then worry about it. I wouldn't disable it, I'd just set it a little longer.

Link to comment

I highly disagree with the 2 above.

 

I currently have 53TB worth of "green" drives, and I can say you should set the timer to 300 second. In my early days I didn't, and some of my drives randomly racked up 100k+ LLCs overnight and then again a month later after I thought it was a fluke. Your drives may appear to be fine, but soon or later the LLCs will start skyrocketing. Since then i've ran "wdidle3.exe /s300" on every drive before I even preclear them. The highest LLC count after 2 years of doing this is 3,300.

 

Be safe instead of sorry, run it, it doesn't take long. I would suggest not disabling the feature all together, some of the new EZRX models have issues with disabling the idle timer all together.

Link to comment
Since then i've ran "wdidle3.exe /s300" on every drive before I even preclear them. The highest LLC count after 2 years of doing this is 3,300.

 

I think that you've just convinced me to go ahead and purchase the e-SATA docking station that I've been looking at, so that I can 'wdidle3' on another machine!

 

My highest load cycle count is currently 124k

Link to comment

I disabled the head parking completely on all of my WD Green drives, but mine are WD20EARS.  I did it for some of the drives after seeing the LCC's get up to around 80,000 after a few months.

 

I don't see any issues with it disabled.

 

I do have one WD20EARX, but I haven't put it in the server yet.

 

I used this website for details: http://www.storagereview.com/how_stop_excessive_load_cycles_western_digital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_wdidle3

 

I did it directly on the server by just booting to a USB drive with DOS. I used unetbootin to create the DOS USB drive.

Link to comment
I did it directly on the server by just booting to a USB drive with DOS. I used unetbootin to create the DOS USB drive.

 

I just did this but couldn't find out how to access additional files (ie wdidle3.exe) on the flash drive.  However, I discovered that my unRAID boot drive was accessible as C:, so I placed wdidle3.exe there.

 

The other issue is that wdidle3 only found drives on the mobo ports, not drives connected to PCI adapters, so I had to move the drives anyway (thank goodness for trayless hot-swap).

 

I think that an external esata docking station is still the way to go ....

Link to comment

Indeed, Rajahal is right, of course, but .....

 

All the drives in my server have an LCC count which is only 2 higher than the Start/Stop count, except for the WD drives.  One has an LCC of 124446, for a Start/Stop count of 9650.  The other has an LCC of 98652, for a Start/Stop of 5695.

 

Oh, and the LCCs are still climbing despite having set wdidle3 /s300 earlier today.  The parity drive has increased by 17, in about 8 hours, and the other by 6 in the same time.  The parity drive has not been powercycled .... perhaps that is necessary for wdidle3 to take effect?

Link to comment

I did it directly on the server by just booting to a USB drive with DOS. I used unetbootin to create the DOS USB drive.

 

I just did this but couldn't find out how to access additional files (ie wdidle3.exe) on the flash drive.  However, I discovered that my unRAID boot drive was accessible as C:, so I placed wdidle3.exe there.

 

The other issue is that wdidle3 only found drives on the mobo ports, not drives connected to PCI adapters, so I had to move the drives anyway (thank goodness for trayless hot-swap).

 

I think that an external esata docking station is still the way to go ....

 

I don't remember if I had an issue with drives that weren't connected to the MB... maybe I did it before I got my SASLP2.

 

To access the files that you place on the flash drive after you boot to DOS, I'm pretty sure you just enter C: with unetbootin.

Link to comment

OK, I just tried this as I am setting up a "new" drive for unRAID.

 

To do this from another USB flash drive (other than your unRAID flash drive):

 

1. Put a new or empty flash drive into the USB port of your desktop computer.

2. Run unetbootin.

3. Select "Distribution" radio button at the top (should be selected as default).

4. Select "FreeDOS" in the "== Select Distribution ==" dropdown (1.0 will be selected automatically in the "== Select Version =="

dropdown).

5. "USB Drive" should already be selected in the "Type" dropdown.

6. Ensure the selected drive letter is correct.

7. Click OK button.

 

unetbootin will create a bootable DOS installation on the USB flash drive and ask to reboot.

You can just close this now and eject/remove the flash drive from your desktop computer.

 

Stop and Powerdown your server.

Remove your unRAID flash drive and insert the DOS flash drive in your server.

Power on your server.

When the server boots and loads the DOS flash drive, select "5. FreeDOS Live CD Only".

The server will load DOS and display A: prompt.

Type "C:" at the prompt and press enter key.

Type "dir" and enter and you should see wdidle3.exe displayed.

Type "wdidle3", enter and you should see your drive displayed with its current idle power setting.

Type "wdidle3 /d", enter to disable the idle timer and let unRAID handle the spindown of the drive.

Link to comment

And just to confuse you, read reply #190

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9865.msg124119#msg124119

 

???

 

I re-read my post (#190) and I think the argument still stands, so I won't edit it. Essentially all I said was 'don't fix what ain't broken'. However, a few months after posting that I did actually start to see the LCC problem with my drives! I documented my experience in this thread. I have not seen any problems with EARX drives, only with EARS drives. However, I only have one or two EARX drives in operation, so that's not a very large sample size.

Link to comment

I have 2 earx drives in my array 1 with 7000 odd hours and wdidle set to either /d or 300 it has a lcc count of 90 the other drive I only just put into the array without running wdidle on it has 197 hours and 152 lcc count I will at some stage run it on the other drive

Link to comment
  • 4 years later...

Pulling up an old thread.

 

I am using mostly WD Green 6TB disks (plus more recently some 6TB blue as well). 16 disk in an array.

 

I have not used any of the described tools and just let it run. I occasionally face the issue that a perfectly fine drive gets disabled by Unraid. Reason unclear, but logs point torwards a controller, cable issue or PSU issue. A few questions:

 

1) Could discussed auto-parking issue with the Green drives also be a potential reason?

 

2) Does the tool still work and would it automatically apply to all disks? Also, have some seagates and red disks, for which I assume this issue does not exist.

 

3) Can the tool be applied with full disks in use or only with new disks?

 

Thanks in advance!

Link to comment

1) Could discussed auto-parking issue with the Green drives also be a potential reason?

 

Doubt it, but it should be better for their health in the long run.

 

2) Does the tool still work and would it automatically apply to all disks? Also, have some seagates and red disks, for which I assume this issue does not exist.

 

Yes, it will work only on WD disks that support that feature.

 

3) Can the tool be applied with full disks in use or only with new disks?

 

It can be used on full disks.

Link to comment

Ah, thanks. You also just replied to my other disk. Thanks a ton, much appreciated!

 

I have 17 disk (15 WDs and Seagates in the array, one WD as parity, one SSD vis PCI-E). Would this tool "pick" the relevant disks from the 17 and just disable it?

 

Is there a step-by-step guide to make sure that I don't destroy the array / disks.

Link to comment

Ah, thanks. You also just replied to my other disk. Thanks a ton, much appreciated!

 

I have 17 disk (15 WDs and Seagates in the array, one WD as parity, one SSD vis PCI-E). Would this tool "pick" the relevant disks from the 17 and just disable it?

 

Is there a step-by-step guide to make sure that I don't destroy the array / disks.

 

It may not work on all controllers, it works for sure on the onboard sata ports, the tool reports the found/changed disks, so you can try and see which ones are changed.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.