Lethargic SATA disk controller?

[Frank616]

Fair enough. Thanks for all the help. At the price of mechanical drives, I'll just chuck it and buy another. While I have issues with Seagate (and have had for years), I've never had any real problems with WD.

Thanks again.

BTW, any suggestion on a replacement drive?

Frank.

[oshunluvr]

Well, I'm a lover of the WDs myself. Depends on the use, but I like that they have a spectrum of different drives for various uses. I've never owned a Green model, but have had Blues in the past and I have 2 Reds and 2 Blacks now. I have 2 Deskstars (Hitachi) also that have done very well, but they're a bit warmer and louder than WDs.

Honestly, except for my server, I'm done buying platters. 1TB Samsung 850s are only $300. Of course, a 1TB WD Black (highest performing) is only $75. If you're using the drive for storage, you don't need performance. You can get a 3TB Red (NAS drive. made to run all the time, but conserve some power, medium performance) for like $110.

My primary desktop drives are 2x256GB Samsung 840 Pros running RAID via btrfs. Zippy and 500GB is plenty of space for me - since my server holds 12TB...

[Frank616]

If you're using the drive for storage, you don't need performance. You can get a 3TB Red (NAS drive. made to run all the time, but conserve some power, medium performance) for like $110.

Yeah, that is what I am looking for, I think.

BTW, this particular WD 1.5 TB Green is most definitely a problem drive! I cannot believe the number of reports of the same type of failure that I have been experiencing!

Anyway, backed it all up just two days ago, so nothing there much if I can't run rsync on it one more time before I blow it away.

Thanks again.

Frank.

[Frank616]

oshunluvr:

One last entry here. I've been researching the 3 and 4 TB Reds, and it looks like they have similar issues about head parking and early failure rates. It also seems that more recent ones have the head parking disabled, and are more reliable. Especially in Linux, IIRC, the system 'blips' the drives every few seconds, and I can see this killing a drive rapidly if the heads keep getting parked in between 'blips'.

My questions are:

1) Why the head parking at all?
2) Turning off head parking can cause what reliability issues?
3) Do the heads still park anyway before a normal power off?
4) If head parking is turned off, what can happen in a power failure in the house?

I'm looking at a 4 TB Red at the moment, as they are the best bang for the buck in that line, and the Reds seem to be designed for 24/7 running, which is the case with my desktop machine. I never shut it off.

Frank.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, it looks like WD has decided that the Reds "needed" the 8 second park time too. Easy enough to fix if you go that route, just use the tool. For a few more bucks, you could go the Blue or a few more up to the Black. I've had no issues with any WD drives in the last 10 years or so, but I never bought a Green and my Reds are a bit older so didn't have the 8 sec. default park time. I know of no reliability issues per se that would be caused by turning off the head parking. You might see a few degrees warmer and a bit more power usage, but @ here, my 2TB Red (without parking) and my 6TB Red (with parking) are both 36° and the 2TB. I comparison, my 2TB Blacks run at 43°. Everything I read says disabling head parking will DEcrease failure rate. Keep in mind you're not totally disabling head parking, just parking of the heads while the thing is running.

To my knowledge, the days of drive heads "crashing" into the platters are long gone. The heads retract automatically at power off regardless of how the power got switched off. The difference between a normal shutdown and yanking the plug is possible damage to the file system, not the hardware. Power outages can cause damage from voltage spikes and other electric events but not physical causes like heads banging into spinning platters.

My first set of the modern version of WDs were 4 500GB Blues I used in a RAID0 config. At the time, that was the best price per meg with reasonable performance. They lasted 6+ years of daily use. I retired them from daily use before they failed. Interesting thing was once the first one finally failed, the next failed with a month. I saw the writing on the wall and tossed the other two at the same time. I had replaced them with two 1 TB Hitachi drives because they were highly rated and cheaper the WD. Then I bought 2 2TB blacks and upgraded the firmware to Enterprise level for max performance. These are still in use at about 4 years old now. The 1TB Hitachi's and 2TB WDs are used for backups now due to their age. Finally I have a 2 year old 2TB and a 1 year old 6TB Red both in my server. Eventually, I will upgrade the server to 4x6TB Reds so I have 12TB with full backup on the server and my desktop will have only SSDs.

[sithlord48]

1) Why the head parking at all?

to save power/ reduce noise

2) Turning off head parking can cause what reliability issues?

No accually due to a fw bug in the WD greens (and possibly others) after 1mil parks the fw will not attempt to read the disk at all i just assumes its broken. this happens more in linux where it can park as often as every 8 seconds (about 1.5 years before 1mil parks).. i lost 1.5 TB of data to this bug. so i turn off parking on every WD drive i can... my replacement from WD (they replaced the disk but not my data ) has been online for 2 or 3 years now w/ parking disabled.

3) Do the heads still park anyway before a normal power off?

Yes

4) If head parking is turned off, what can happen in a power failure in the house?

same thing that can happen with it on if your reading the disk the head might not be parked when the power goes out..

[Frank616]

Much thanks! Stat holiday here today, so have to wait till 11 AM (Mountain) to go get another drive. I was able to do a final sync on the failing 1.5 TB Green, so it can just get a couple of 3/8" holes drilled through it, and then go in the trash. Would take the FBI to get any data off it then.

I also noticed that the last sync I did between the Green in my desktop and my media PC that several files failed to sync with some sort of error I have not seen before. I synced the media PC with my laptop this morning, and all those files did sync correctly. So, the Green is not long for this world, for sure.

Frank.

[Frank616]

Thanks sithlord48. I see I have a 2 TB Green as my off-site backup (bare drive sitting in a cardboard box in our trailer), so when I sync it this time, I'll turn off head parking on it too. However, it runs less than 24 hours in a year, so should last for a long time. The Red I will buy today will get head parking turned off as well.

Frank.

[oshunluvr]

same thing that can happen with it on if your reading the disk the head might not be parked when the power goes out..

I believe this actually isn't correct. Modern voice-coil actuated hard disk drives are all auto-parking. My understanding is the parking occurs automatically internally at spin down. Various methods are used to do this, like a weak spring that pulls the heads to the landing zone when power is shut off. Some use of the rotational energy remaining in the spinning platter to move the heads off the data surface when the power is cut off. I'm sure there are other methods. Check with any manufacturer. WWW reports of head crashes caused by power-off events are outdated or FUD. AFAIK, only dropping or striking the drive or internal hardware failure can cause an actual crash (head physically contacting the platter)

The danger, as I stated, with an unplanned power-off is potential damage to the file system and data corruption or possible even sector damage, but not a crash.

However, actual power outages may cause damage through voltage spikes or surges. A simple battery backup would prevent this.

[sithlord48]

With parking on or off if the disk is reading / writing when the power is cut there should be no difference in where the head stops. (i.e i don't think auto parking is any safer for power failures) the danger is really only for file system corruption . i've done computers for a long time and in all my years I have never seen a hdd die from a power outage and i have seen one hdd with out its head parked when i took it apart and this hdd somehow managed to break the pivot the head rests on so it was physically unable to move to park. That drive also made very horrible noises when it had power to it...

[oshunluvr]

I think I mis-read what Sithlord was saying. I agree the head wouldn't be parked when the power went out. I was saying it would park itself after a power off, regardless of the reason power went out, but it would not crash the head into the platter. Sithlord's answer to the question "If head parking is turned off, what can happen in a power failure in the house?" is absolutely correct. Turning off the idle parking feature has no effect on the outcome of a power outage.

I also agree the idle parking "feature" would not be any sort of protection for anything really, except maybe saving a few watts of power at the expense of the life expectancy of the drive.

I'm sure, like me, Sithlord remembers the days when hard drives were 5.25" wide and 3.25" tall and sounded like a helicopter warming up when you turned them on. Man, they got hot too! In those days, head crashes weren't unheard of. I've only actually had one and it was an old drive even for then.

[Frank616]

OK, bought the 4 TB WD Red at about 11 this morning. It is now 3 PM locally, and all my data is off the Green, and onto the Red. It works GREAT! Speed is close to instantaneous on most files. DigiKam still takes its sweet time indexing my picture files, but at least I can see the progress indicator moving now. And, once it is done, it will only have to update after that.

So far, so good!

Frank.

[jlittle]

Thank you, oshunluvr, for an interesting thread.

... I also agree the idle parking "feature" would not be any sort of protection for anything really, except maybe saving a few watts of power at the expense of the life expectancy of the drive.

This is about laptops, isn't it? I thought the point in parking heads was to minimize the chance of the heads being out when a laptop is dropped (or rather the sudden deceleration shortly after being dropped).


Regards, John Little

[oshunluvr]

Thank you, oshunluvr, for an interesting thread.

This is about laptops, isn't it? I thought the point in parking heads was to minimize the chance of the heads being out when a laptop is dropped (or rather the sudden deceleration shortly after being dropped).

Regards, John Little

Possibly, but the drives in question are not laptop drives, thus idle parking isn't needed IMO.

[Frank616]

John:

No, it is a desktop machine. A Lenovo TW 4524 with all the drive bays maxed out.

Frank.