Western Digital Greens - EARS replacing EADS?


tyrindor

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Does anyone know if the "EARS" (64MB cache) are replacing the "EADS" (32MB Cache) Western Digital Green hard drives? I noticed that the EADS prices went up, and the EARS prices are the same or lower. EARS use more power, and they've been getting some iffy reviews. I still need to buy some more EADS but they are currently at $110-$115 rather than the $100 I paid a few weeks ago. I can't figure out if they are keeping both models, or cancelling EADS.. judging by the pricing it seems like the latter.

 

Anyone have any insight on this?

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I guess I'm not completely sure, but I've always assumed the EARS drives were replacing the EADS drives.  I see little reason for Western Digital to continue both lines, given that the main difference is the EARS drives use 4k hard drive sectors, while the EADS use 512 byte sectors.  I'm surprised there's a noticeable difference in power consumption.  Maybe Western Digital just updated the specs to be a little more realistic.  I really don't know.

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I guess I'm not completely sure, but I've always assumed the EARS drives were replacing the EADS drives.  I see little reason for Western Digital to continue both lines, given that the main difference is the EARS drives use 4k hard drive sectors, while the EADS use 512 byte sectors.  I'm surprised there's a noticeable difference in power consumption.  Maybe Western Digital just updated the specs to be a little more realistic.  I really don't know.

 

I've heard that the EARS are having major performance issues in Linux (due to 4K sectors), which is the main reason i'm trying to stay away from them.

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All EARS drives do no use more power.  Only the 1TB drive has an issue with using the same power when spun up regardless of whether it is active or not.  When spun down, it uses the same low power of all the others.

 

As for performance, I am unaware of any performance related issues under Linux being reported by any reputable sources.

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Good to know, I may just switch over to EARS then. I was told by two different people that 4K sectors don't play well with Linux and when your reading/writing the speeds would varying greatly.. from 1k/s to 20mb/s then back down to 1k/s, etc.

 

I wonder about this one. There may be other issues coming to play here.

From what I remember, the filesystem's block size is 4k, so having a drive using 4k sectors seems more efficient. (unless I am missing something).

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You OS was already using 4K block size by default.

 

There are four distinct units that you must be keeping in mind:

 

1. Hardware block size (i.e. sector)

2. Filesystem block size, (a block, or under FAT what is called a cluster... the smallest unit of filesystem size).

 

ReiserFS default is 4K blocks.... but admittedly, I haven't checked if unRAID alters that.

 

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You OS was already using 4K block size by default.

 

There are four distinct units that you must be keeping in mind:

 

1. Hardware block size (i.e. sector)

2. Filesystem block size, (a block, or under FAT what is called a cluster... the smallest unit of filesystem size).

 

ReiserFS default is 4K blocks.... but admittedly, I haven't checked if unRAID alters that.

 

It does not:

debugreiserfs /dev/md1

debugreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)

 

Filesystem state: consistency is not checked after last mounting

 

Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x901 of format 3.6 with standard journal

Count of blocks on the device: 122096638

Number of bitmaps: 3727

Blocksize: 4096

Free blocks (count of blocks - used [journal, bitmaps, data, reserved] blocks): 4283526

Root block: 28805639

Filesystem is NOT clean

Tree height: 5

Hash function used to sort names: "r5"

Objectid map size 84, max 972

Journal parameters:

        Device [0x0]

        Magic [0x5c97ac25]

        Size 8193 blocks (including 1 for journal header) (first block 18)

        Max transaction length 1024 blocks

        Max batch size 900 blocks

        Max commit age 30

Blocks reserved by journal: 0

Fs state field: 0x0:

sb_version: 2

inode generation number: 19459

UUID: ebc0aeb3-a2e7-4ee7-b4f2-cdf4e556abf6

LABEL:

Set flags in SB:

        ATTRIBUTES CLEAN

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I replaced my 2 clicking Seagate 1.5TB drives that I just bought 1.5 months ago to build my unraid (1 for parity and 1 for data) with 2 WD 1.5TB EARS and so far no problems.  I've been running 1 as the parity for about a week now and then just swapped out the data drive with the 2nd drive.  Everything rebuilt and parity check is ok.  Everything seems fine so far on my end.  It's much better not hearing any clicking every minute between both of the Seagates that I had, not to mention all the pauses I used to get during read and writes.

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It's much better not hearing any clicking every minute between both of the Seagates that I had, not to mention all the pauses I used to get during read and writes.

I agree, I would have swapped them out too.

Did you notice any improvement in performance with the EARS?

 

I haven't copied a lot of data over to it yet, but I might later tonight, so I'll definitely let you all know.  Even if it's a little slower, it'll probably still be faster since the transfers won't keep pauses.  It used to sound like the head was constantly trying to realign.

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It's much better not hearing any clicking every minute between both of the Seagates that I had, not to mention all the pauses I used to get during read and writes.

I agree, I would have swapped them out too.

Did you notice any improvement in performance with the EARS?

 

I think the write speed is definitely slower.  I wish I could remember my numbers before...

 

I think I used to write at about 25MB/sec.

 

I get about 60MB/sec read (4 1gb file transfer) and write is about 12MB/sec - I think that is about half the speed of what it was before.  I don't care too much about write speed.

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It's much better not hearing any clicking every minute between both of the Seagates that I had, not to mention all the pauses I used to get during read and writes.

I agree, I would have swapped them out too.

Did you notice any improvement in performance with the EARS?

 

I think the write speed is definitely slower.  I wish I could remember my numbers before...

 

I think I used to write at about 25MB/sec.

 

I get about 60MB/sec read (4 1gb file transfer) and write is about 12MB/sec - I think that is about half the speed of what it was before.  I don't care too much about write speed.

 

That's terrible... I'm using all EADS (Currently 8, counting parity) and I get ~90MB/s reads and ~20MB/s writes. Your suffering from the exact same thing that made me make this thread. Many users are reporting a huge performance loss over EADS. It makes no sense... I doubt it's the bigger cache size, it has to be the fact they used 4k sectors.

 

I sometimes stream 2 blu-rays at a time, and 60MB/s read is borderline for that. Once again, I might just hold off on EARS. Seems like EADS are getting hard to find though.

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Many users are reporting a huge performance loss over EADS.

 

Who and where...... without a cite, it is just hearsay.

 

Just random people on the internet that i've came across while googling about EARS vs EADS. I have no proof, so I posted here to see if anyone had any info on the EARS. Judging by the above poster, he's getting much slower speeds on his EARS. Western Digital has definitely discontinued EADS (I just called them). So i'm honestly clueless on what i'm going to do because I need another.... 12 hard drives or so.

 

I might just buy a single EAR hard drive and see how it goes...

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Could it be that the perceived hit on performance might have to do with the following: (halfway down page)

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

 

a snippet from a syslog illustrating the offset of 63:

 

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk0: [8,0] (sda) SAMSUNG HD103UJ S13PJDWQC24868 offset: 63 size: 976762552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk1: [8,64] (sde) SAMSUNG HD103UJ S13PJDWQC24857 offset: 63 size: 976762552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk2: [8,32] (sdc) SAMSUNG HD103UJ S13PJ1EQ407587 offset: 63 size: 976762552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk3: [8,48] (sdd) SAMSUNG HD103UJ S13PJ1EQ407571 offset: 63 size: 976762552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk4: [8,16] (sdb) SAMSUNG HD103UJ S13PJ1EQ407572 offset: 63 size: 976762552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk5: [8,128] (sdi) SAMSUNG HD753LJ S13UJ1MPA02076 offset: 63 size: 732574552

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk6: [8,80] (sdf) Maxtor 6L300S0 L60LRK4G offset: 63 size: 293057320

Feb 11 11:44:04 Tower kernel: md: import disk7: [8,112] (sdh) Maxtor 6B300S0 B605H6SH offset: 63 size: 293057320

 

Malcolm....

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I've went ahead and ordered a 1.5TB EARS drive with my Amazon Prime (2-day shipping). I'll post EADS vs EARS Read & Write comparisons after I receive it, assuming that it preclears without errors. If it's over 10% slower than the EADS it's going back.

 

I have 8x 1.5TB EADS that all performance within ~2MB/s of each other. So i'm hoping that the EARS isn't far off of them.

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I sometimes stream 2 blu-rays at a time, and 60MB/s read is borderline for that.

 

No it's not. 60Mb/sec would be, but 60MB/sec would not.

 

60Mb/sec = 7.5MB/sec.

 

So how much does a uncompressed blu-ray take to playback with lossless audio? PowerDVD is telling me around 35-40MB/s (Yes, megaBYTE/sec) per movie. Which would be above 60MB/s when watching two movies. It's probably PowerDVD just failing again....

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I sometimes stream 2 blu-rays at a time, and 60MB/s read is borderline for that.

 

No it's not. 60Mb/sec would be, but 60MB/sec would not.

 

60Mb/sec = 7.5MB/sec.

 

So how much does a blu-ray take to playback with lossless audio? PowerDVD is telling me around 35-40MB/s (Yes, megaBYTE/sec). Now that I think of it, that can't be right... because most discs can only RIP at 25MB/s or so.

 

The maximum possible bitrate allowed by the Blu-ray spec is 54.0Mbps.

See http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/ if you don't believe me.

 

Of my 500 Blu-ray discs, the one with the highest bitrate that I've measured is just over 50mbps: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3025.msg33510#msg33510

 

54Mbps is 6.75MB/sec.

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