| « The Friday Picture: Futility | Harmony wireless remote extender » |
Attention NAS users: Before you make the same mistake as I and trust the false advertising of Western Digital and their "green drives" think twice!!!
I was led to believe that the WD Caviar® Green™ WD10EACS is the perfect drive to install into my single-bay NAS. If you are not a storage specialist, you will not know that there is a huge difference between enterprise- or server-class harddrives and regular consumers drives.
The WD is a consumer drive which is recommended by many NAS-suppliers (and by WD itself) as the perfect drive for single- and multi-bay storage devices. I was amazed by the 1TB storage and out of sheer ignorance failed to understand what the term "load-cycle-count" means as I usually am only familiar with a mean-time-between-failure term of hours of operations. I further (wrongly) trusted that with a 3-year-warranty, this must be a reliable drive. ALL WRONG!!!
Some facts and why you should not purchase any of those drives:
- The load-cycle-count describes the number of times the drives heads park. The WD's reliability/data-integrity is only guaranteed up to a load-cycle count of 300,000.
- Western Digital stated that the drive is only supported on Windows and Mac and not "designed" for Linux - WTF?
The above does not sound tragic enough? Well, all NAS's run a version of Linux - problem number 1. Second, the majority of users are reporting an hourly increase of 50-100 load-cycle-counts. Thats between 1200-2400 per day which will with that type of usage reach 300,000 within 6 months. There are workarounds, where you keep the drive busy all the time or reduce the spin-down time - in my opinion the wrong approach as the drives are not designed to be in long-term operation.
In my scenario I purchased the drive 20th July 2008 and as of today I set at 348,000 LCC. Within a short 4 months without any heavy usage in the NAS I am out of warranty and face the risk of data loss - THANKS WESTERN DIGITAL - YOU COST ME R 2,000.00 (and your "3-year-limited-warranty" does not cover this either!!!!
6 comments
-
§ Paul Gray said on : 14/07/09 @ 17:03
Damn!! I just bought this unit and now I come across your post.... Hope I have a bit of a better story to tell. How do you find out the load cycle count?
-
§ gnaschenweng®
said on : 14/07/09 @ 17:31
a smartctl --all /dev/hda will display the load-cycle count for you -
§ ThemeParks33 said on : 05/08/09 @ 02:15
I am glad there are still people who really expose what is not supposed to be. Others love to see others in misery when they are in the same state.
-
§ Heim said on : 28/11/09 @ 11:57
I had the same problem with this drive as an internal drive. Couldn't get it to disable parking every 8 seconds. I just wrote a program to write a file every 7 seconds, stopped the parking. Nothing else to do since it would hit 300,000 within 2 years.
-
§ mioux said on : 27/01/10 @ 19:44
I have a Caviar Green in a synology, which was previously on a custom NAS with Fedora for about 18 month, my load-cycle is 474 ???
-
§ maju said on : 03/02/10 @ 15:00
WD will honor warranty even with high LCC's. Disabling head parking is easy. Disconnect the drive, connect it to internal SATA on a PC, boot DOS from CD-ROM and run WDIDLE3 /D. That will ruin the warranty though...but it works on 1.5TB EADS.
Comment feed for this post
