Mount NTFS from "Live" system?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <78bf2bd4-63e0-afce-1b24-ebdadba055b5 at qeng-ho.org>, 
Arthur Chance <freebsd at qeng-ho.org> wrote:

>> I have -never- had any WD "black" drive fail on me, but I don't believe
>> that I'll be buying any more of the "blue" ones.  (The fact that this one
>> failed is rather inexplicable, because even though it was 3 years old,
>> it had less than 1,000 power-on hours on it, and less than 200 power-ups.)
>
>As a matter of curiosity, did you note the Start_Stop_Count value and
>was it far higher than the power cycle count?

Well, fortunately, I did not actually dismantle the drive or beat it with
a hammer, as I usually do before I put a "bad" drive in my e-waste pile.
So I was able to check, just now and get a precise answer to your question:

    Start/stop count (raw):   709
    Power Cycle count (raw):  235

>I've had WD Blue drives fail on me as well. I think it's because the
>2.5" Blue drives are aimed at laptops and their firmware has (or had)
>the same aggressive power saving/head parking behaviour as the Green
>drives, which interacts badly with Unix style regular syncs. I got round
>that by installing smartmontools and using
>
>	-e standby,off
>
>in smartd.conf to prevent the disk idling. It may seem paradoxical that
>making the disk work more stops it failing...

Wow!  These are all revelations to me!  Thank you!  I knew that the WD green
drives were designed to idle themselves, and apparently my shiny new 4TB
WD "My Passport" external USB 3.0 drive was set at the factory to do that
also... an annoyance which I believe that I have now successfully disabled
on that drive.

What I never knew till today was that any of the "blue" drives would self-idle.

Does that only happen on the 2.5" "laptop" ones?

Anyway, yea, I can see how this could possibly cause problems in the case of
*nix systems.  (And it is annoying to me generally when my various tech toys
start thinking that they are smarter than I am, and making decisions for me,
especially those that I would not have made myself.)

I'm gonna try to see if I can disable this "feature" on this specific drive
and then see If I can maybe get it to complete the self test... which it did
not do the last time I tried.

But one would think/hope that even if the drive was set to auto-idle, it would
at least have enough brains/courtesy not to fall asleep in the middle of a
built-in firmware self-test.  But maybe not.  And maybe this drive is not
actually broke after all.

I'll be checking on that.

>These days I mainly use SSDs so spin up/down isn't a problem.

Quite so.

However if your SSDs ever -do- start to spin, then you've got a real
problem on your hands. :-)