immense delayed write to file system (ZFS and UFS2), performance issues

[Bruce Cran]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:28:58 +0100
Morgan Wesström <freebsd-questions at pp.dyndns.biz> wrote:

> Garrett Moore wrote:
> > The drives being discussed in my related thread (regarding poor
> > performance) are all WD Green drives. I have used wdidle3 to set
> > all of my drive timeouts to 5 minutes. I'll see what sort of
> > difference this makes for performance.
> > 
> > Even if it makes no difference to performance, thank you for
> > pointing it out -- my drives have less than 2,000 hours on them and
> > were all over 90,000 load cycles due to this moronic factory
> > setting. Since changing the timeout, they haven't parked (which is
> > what I would expect).
> > 
> 
> You're welcome. I just feel as bad for you as for everyone else who
> has bought these obviously Windoze optimized harddrives. Unfortunately
> neither wdidle3 nor an updated firmware is available or functioning on
> the latest models in the Green series. At least that's what I've read
> from other people having this issue. WD only claims they don't support
> Linux and they probably have never heard of FreeBSD.

You might be able to tune the APM settings on the drive using
sysutils/ataidle to change the amount of time the drive waits until
parking the heads.

-- 
Bruce Cran