On 28/04/2011 11:43 AM, Harryk wrote:
Canuck57 wrote:
On 28/04/2011 6:53 AM, Harryk wrote:
I'm putting together a new server and was about to order four 2-terabyte
Western Digital "Green" enterprise hard drives for it.

I've never really thought about why these drives are called "green,"
other than they are supposed to use less power than "non-green" drives.
Obviously, they do this by shutting the drive down when it isn't being
accessed.

Apparently, though, when you use "green" drives in a server, you end up
with a dramatically high Load/UnLoad Cycle Count, and this can lead to
premature ejac-, er, drive failure.

There is a way to turn off the "green" on the WD drives, by adjusting
the drive's idle timer to lower the Load/Unload cycle rate, but it is a
pain in the ass, involving preparing a DOS boot disk, installing the
drive in a computer, and running a program. Not difficult, but I don't
have a "Windoze" computer anymore that can boot up into DOS. :)

I'm guessing the "green" drives of other vendors will behave similarly.

Sheesh, I never learned any of this stuff in my college English classes.
Even an O.F. like me is not too old to learn.

Failure of drives is exclusive to the (lack of) quality of the drives.
How much power they use is not a factor. If anything, lower power, less
heat and slower access times for less vibration should actually be
better.

I would use Seagate drives. And forget DOS/MS products. Use Linux.
Ubuntu or Fedora. No way to turn off green, they run slower, consume
less juice by design.

Use HW RAID on the boot disks if the mobo supports it.


According to Western Digital, the manufacturer of the drive,
dramatically high LOAD/UNLOAD cycles lead to premature disk failure.

Your argument is with WD, not with me. I suspect they know more about
their drives than you do.

True. But if setting up as a server, disable the damned green crap and
spin the drives 7x24. Use green drives, just don't idle the things.
That is, get the lower rotation speeds to save power, but keep them
spinning. I do this on all my 7x24 systems even the desktops.

Spinning up/down drives on servers is stupid as writing to cold drives
can also be an issue.

And if you are using Linux which has first rate caching, the slower RPMs
will not be much of a issue for performance. Memory makes up for RPM
performance losses. Linux, unlike MS stuff can quickly use most of the
systems RAM for caching in a blink. MS-Windows caching is a dog.

Think I am kidding, do a network copy in or out of a big video file.
Once using MS_Windows and once using Linux. Linux is usually 3.5 to 6
times faster.
--
I can assure you that the road to prosperity is not paved with
fleabagger debt.