hdparm: excessive Load_Cycle_Count with some WD "Intelli-Park" HDDs
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
hdparm (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
High
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
On a Dell E5420 I noticed the HDD is constantly spinning up/down. The drive is a WDC2500BEVT-7 which is apparently a "green" WD HDD which has firmware magic called "Intelli-Park" to park the HDD to save power.. Apparently the default settings it parks the heads after 8 seconds of inactivity and with a lifetime of ~1,000,000 Load_Cycle_Counts we may see these drives fail sooner than expected.
I was easily able to get the HDD to bump the Load_Cycle_Count by at least ~4 in 60 seconds, which equates to ~700,000 in a year assuming we use the HDD for 8 hours a day. The lifetime is ~1,000,000 Load_Cycle_Counts, so this is a bit alarming to say the least. This happens even with hdparm -B 128 /dev/sda; I was under the impression that values > 127 *should* not permit spin down, but looks like this drive needs -B 255 for stop this. So I think we have a green drive that tries too hard and will end up shortening its life.
There is some discussion of this here:
http://
And some explanation from WD about the issue here:
http://
This may affect the following models:
WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS
Can we quirk on these drives to select a more appropriate default hdparm setting?
Changed in hdparm (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | nobody → Steve Langasek (vorlon) |
Changed in hdparm (Ubuntu): | |
importance: | Undecided → High |
Changed in hdparm (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | Steve Langasek (vorlon) → Dmitrijs Ledkovs (dmitrij.ledkov) |
Changed in hdparm (Ubuntu): | |
assignee: | Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox) → nobody |
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.