Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 05:18:06 +0200, Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions
wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 22:38:55 +0200, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>>(Speaking of WD Green, not WD in general) it is true, unless you run 
>>their utility (DOS only!) which disables this "feature".
>>However the drives will tend to fail in a short time all the same.  
>
>That perhaps was true for some older drives, that spin down after a few
>seconds, but it anyway required something to wake up the drives again.
>Howvere, it's untrue for those drives that are just a few years old. My
>spins down after 30 minutes, and stays a sleep , if no evil software
>touches it. I never had to use a tool, which anyway wouldn't have
>worked, because it's an USB device.
>
>>> IOW the green WD drives do exactly what is required by the EU
>>> Regulation    
>>
>>???  
>
>By an EU Regulation all external drives must go to sleep after a while.
>
>>> just some software is bad programmed. Don't use this
>>> software. nOt the drives, the software is bad.    
>>
>>Don't use the drives: no point in spinning up and down; besides, as I 
>>said, I had 4 of them and even if I disabled this brain damage, they
>>all died within one year.  
>
>I already explained why this happened. The spins for your drive might
>not have happened within seconds after using this utility, but as for
>my drive, when using bad software, what I usually don't do, every 30
>minutes or something around this. I bought my WD green drive 2013-02-27
>and never had an issue, IOW it's nearly 4 years old. As already pointed
>out, I don't use gvfs, smartd and similar software that touches the
>drives and enforce a spin up, directly after the drives goes asleep.
>
>You spread FUD about WD drives.

Sure, if a green drive is unwanted, nobody should buy a green drive.
However, assuming somebody should have bought one by accident, then
simply let a script access it, before it spins down. If the drives goes
to sleep at around 30 minutes, "touch" the drive every 28 minutes.

Assuming it should be ok, that the drive goes to sleep, remove gvfs,
don't use KDE, smard etc., then the drive stays asleep.