Critical issues with WD green drives

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Thursday 02 June 2011 16:54:52 Bruce Cran 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.

This is very important, because I've had 2 drives die (most likely) because 
they had over 220K load cycles. One was less than a year old.

You don't mention the exact models but there's a good chance these are the 
"Advanced Format" drives, in other words 4K sectors. If your filesystem(s) or 
partition(s) are not properly aligned that also severely hampers performance 
to the point it looks like a hang.

All in all I wouldn't recommend these drives for use in a server. The WD's 
Blue and Black series are OK though.

Your machine shouldn't reboot however, that points to another problem.

- Pieter