Re: WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1: harddrive which does crazy unloading

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

(sorry, forgot to actually cc Daniel.  cc'ing and quoting whole body)

On 03/19/2010 11:26 AM, Tejun Heo wrote:
> (cc'ing Daniel, Hi)
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On 03/19/2010 01:15 AM, Al Bogner wrote:
>> WD said to me I can send them the disk, but didn't accept, that this is a 
>> firmware bug.
>>
>> Today I got a brandnew WD20EARS (2TB) and it is the same. After about an 1/2 
>> hr. I had 12 cycles with an _un_formatted disk.
> 
> That would reach 1.43 years of operation hour w/ 300k limit.  Maybe
> that's the number they are aiming for?  I don't know.  I haven't heard
> from WDC yet.
> 
>> I cannot accept, that it should be a warranty issue, because this
>> reduces the lifetime _after_ the warranty and increases the
>> possibility to loose data, at least for those who don't use a raid.
>>
>> I would be happy to have a native linux utility to change this.
> 
> Yeah, that will be nice but it's of very limited use.  How many would
> look that up, install it and use it to adjust the parameter?  For it
> to have meaningful effect, it should be applied automatically, and at
> that point, I'm not sure it's a good idea because I don't want to
> unconditionally disable power saving feature without a very good
> rationale.
> 
> If WDC thinks < 1.5 years of uptime is good enough for those products
> in exchange of lowered power consumption, which I think might be
> acceptable for certain products considering that most people don't use
> their computers 24/7 and the load/unload cycle limit isn't exactly an
> accurate timebomb like limit.  Well, then, that's the trade off WDC
> made and the consumers can choose accordingly.
> 
> And, if that's the case, I think we can and probably should try to let
> people know about the particular tradeoff of those drives and if
> possible provide a utility to adjust that but I'm still kind of
> against automatically disabling it because it doesn't help solving the
> situation in the long run while forcing us to apply a sub-optimal
> workaround without knowing whether it's really necessary.
> 
> Daniel, I think we really need some clarification from WDC at this
> point.  I'm sure WDC wouldn't want Linux distros to go ahead and
> disable powersaving feature unconditionally, so please let us know.
> 
> Thanks.
> 


-- 
tejun