Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good?

[Norman Invasion <invasivenorman@gmail.com>]

On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion
> <invasivenorman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
>>> videos on, eventually.  The prices are coming down now.  I keep seeing
>>> these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
>>>  When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?
>>> Are they as dependable as a plain drive?  I guess they are more
>>> efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no
>>> difference?
>>>
>>> I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper.  That much
>>> I have figured out.  Other than that, I can't see any other difference.
>>>  Data speeds seem to be about the same.
>>>
>>
>> They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals.
>> This runs up "193 Load_Cycle_Count" unacceptably: as many
>> as a few hundred thousand in a year & a million cycles is
>> getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives.  I end
>> up running some iteration of
>> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
>> every boot.
>>
>
> Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was
> built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's
> on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests
> say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has
> been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was
> something like 300000 max with the drive currently clocking in at
> 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am
> trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone >2x at
> this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter
> what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to
> put a backup drive in the box to get ready.
>

Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, &
checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be
at >400000.  It only made it another month or so before
having unrecoverable errors.

Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193
Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I
gots my suspicions.  Many of 'em highly suspectable.