Critical issues with WD green drives

[Reid Linnemann]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:16:01 +0200
> Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:
>
>> In a server of mine (7.3p4/i386) I replaced a 1TB Hitachi SATA drive
>> (which worked perfectly), with two brand new Western Digital 2TB
>> disks. Now I'm having critical problems, ranging from the disks
>> getting stuck, to the box rebooting.
>> Those are not the main disks in the box, so they are currently
>> unmounted; I wasn't even able to run newfs on them, since every
>> process that tries to use these disk will hang after a while (and
>> can't be killed either).
>
> I'd guess this is probably due to their overly-aggressive power
> management. If you can, run wdidle3.exe from a Windows environment to
> turn off the default idle timer.
>
> --
> Bruce Cran
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I've gotten similar errors before with a failing power supply. After
an electrical storm I started getting HD errors all over the place. I
replaced drives, futzed with SATA cables, booted, rebooted, and when
the machine got stable finally I just tried to leave it alone. Finally
I bought a new atom board, thinking that some component on the
mainboard had been killed by the storm. Problems persisted until my
mini-itx case came in with a fresh (less powerful) power supply.