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Harryk

wrote:
On Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:53:18 -0400,
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.

I imagine when they say "DOS disk" they really are talking about
loading W/D Data Lifeguard tools from a Dr DOS disk. It is self
contained and does not depend on what your normal OS is.
You are just booting it.
You have the same deal with MaxBlast on Maxtor drives or SeaTools on
Seagate drives. The install disk is a self loader. They use Dr DOS
because it can handle NTFS drives right out of the box and the license
is cheaper.
This can also partition, format and clone your drives a lot easier
than Windoze Disk Manager.

That's pretty much it...I decided against these drives, though, and went
with four "non-green" enterprise drives.