[kwlug-disc] Wanted: help in refining presentation

[Chris Irwin]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 9:01 AM, unsolicited <unsolicited at swiz.ca> wrote:

> On 7/27/2012 1:33 AM, Colin K wrote:
>
>> Fair call about the Green drives my storage system really doesn't
>> serve files to hundreds of people just me so my needs were more
>> focused on power consumption than speed but it would be nice if they
>> were a bit perkier and freenas does have settings to increase their
>> level of aliveness.  But I've got that all tuned down pretty far
>> also.  Kind of stinks on the rare occasion that I do need it to be a
>> bit more expedient but otherwise its fine.
>>
>
> What I can't wrap my head around is - as far as I knew, the real wear on a
> drive is the stopping and starting. So going green is choosing up front to
> decrease the hard drive life span we're used to?
>

I did some research on consumer raid solutions: I want to protect my data
and I'm cheap. So I don't want to pay for "enterprise" hardware.

Part of the problem of Green Drives was that they spun themselves down
after about ~7 seconds in firmware, regardless of what your OS power
management settings were. Further access attempts would have to wait for
the drive to spin up. RAID controllers can apparently register this as a
failed drive, causing it to drop out of the array.

Apparently WD issued an update to allow you to modify or remove the timeout.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,674613/Hard-drives-Western-Digital-also-got-problems/News/

There are other issues with using consumer drives with actual RAID
controllers (TLER/CCTL), but I'm not comfortable enough with my knowledge
there to put it in writing :)

Personally, I use my green drives for backup drives, and have regular
desktop drives in my RAID array (using mdadm, not dedicated hardware).

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>
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