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

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
>
> On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support
>> time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view
>> of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in
>> any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to
>> Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years.
>>
>
> I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays.
>
> But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be
> 'more forgiving'?
>
> Rgds,

Possibly. Someone with more experience with mdadm probably could do a
better job but I'd never done RAID of any type at that time (I'm just
a home user who taught myself whatever little I know about Linux
through this list) and built this server with 5 drives to run a number
of Windows VMs so I was pretty sure I wanted RAID. I bought the WD
Green 1TB drives a little over 2 years ago and had multiple problems.
First problem was the 4K sector size issue which was fairly new at
that time, and then once I got past that I tried RAID and it still
didn't work well at all.

The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from
WD called something like wdtwiddle or something silly as I remember it
but I decided to cut my storage in half and replaced the 1TB Green
drives with 500GB Enterprise drives.

Since then I've heard of people using Green drives for RAID and doing
fine but it didn't work with the ones I purchased.

- Mark