Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

That is a great deal you have got there PCBONEZ, I know because I've had 2 out of 3 WD RE2 GP drives die on me in the first few months...

And as we saw in the big report that Google released from their datacenters many drives die in their first 3 months.
After that the failure rate goes way down untill they are around 2 years old, then it starts to increase again...
(I first thought it was at around 4 years they started to die, so my text reads a bit strange now but oh well)

Oh, and the RE (Raid Edition) drives are important if you use a RAID controller.
A normal harddrive can take up to a minute to try to read a difficult sector, most RAID controllers will list a non-responding drive as failed after 10>20 seconds...
That is why Time Limited Error Recovery drives exist...

Just about everything 'round here is on a RAID controller now.
Unless I absolutely can't I set them up with an installed hot-spare.

[dood]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Oh, and the RE (Raid Edition) drives are important if you use a RAID controller.
A normal harddrive can take up to a minute to try to read a difficult sector, most RAID controllers will list a non-responding drive as failed after 10>20 seconds...
That is why Time Limited Error Recovery drives exist...

Yep, on my home system I have two WD 750gb Black's in a stripe, but they were the older drives that you could use the TLER tool on.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

That is a great deal you have got there PCBONEZ, I know because I've had 2 out of 3 WD RE2 GP drives die on me in the first few months...

And as we saw in the big report that Google released from their datacenters many drives die in their first 3 months.
After that the failure rate goes way down untill they are around 2 years old, then it starts to increase again...

The temp-to-failure rate curve is pretty interesting too.
Fewer failures at 35-45C than at lower temps.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

PCBONEZ; Yea, that article has some very interesting tidbits of information
Especially the temperature as you say...

I'm sure you know that Google does not use A/C cooling for their datacenters, and have built very special custom mainboards with a 12v battery in the front of the rack and a 230VAC > 12v PSU for the whole system
So the mainboard itself then has DC/DC converters for the harddrive etc that require the 3.3v and 5v supplies...
Very cool solution

[Scenic]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

those custom boards were made by gigabyte btw

as for TLER on WD drives..
http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/hardware-wiki/wdtler.zip

some caviar green and blue drives support it.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Here are some relevant links for the Google servers if anyone is interested and have not seen them before...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J139Aelaf0g

[mockingbird]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

some caviar green and blue drives support it.

Not likely. Maybe some of the really early ones. Also, the parameter has to be set each reboot for some drives that do support it. In any case, Windows has no real measure for reliable software-level/bios-level RAID. In fact, I set up a RAID 1 array with two Caviar Blue drives for a customer not too long ago (At his insistence).

Within a few days, he was getting this BSOD:


This was with AMD SB850 RAID. I've heard that ICH RAID is even less reliable. Of course, with or without TLER/CCTL, the drive's I/O timeout parameter is still dependent on the controller. I've heard Intel's ICH RAID is even worse. With TLER/CCTL the array would have failed even sooner.

Solution is not to run RAID in Windows unless you do it with a very high-end RAID controller and TLER/CCTL drives that are physically hotswappable.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

This was with AMD SB850 RAID. I've heard that ICH RAID is even less reliable. Of course, with or without TLER/CCTL, the drive's I/O timeout parameter is still dependent on the controller. I've heard Intel's ICH RAID is even worse. With TLER/CCTL the array would have failed even sooner.

Solution is not to run RAID in Windows unless you do it with a very high-end RAID controller and TLER/CCTL drives that are physically hotswappable.

I fully agree with this.
I originally tried with ICH9R RAID, it was a complete failure.
When it worked it was fine, but even something like a bluescreen in Windows forced a reinitzialization of the data on the RAID-5 array, which took 8 hours and the array was extremely slow during this time...

An actual rebuild of a failed drive took 51 hours!!!
Starting Windows at this stage took 20 minutes!

I swapped that crap out for a LSI 8704ELP and after that it has been much better.
Not perfectly smooth sailing but atleast when there is a problem my computer does not turn dog slow.
And the rebuild process is quite fast for a failed drive, at around 4 hours which is the time a full format such a drive takes anyway...

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Here are some relevant links for the Google servers if anyone is interested and have not seen them before...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J139Aelaf0g

>>>
typical power supplies provide computers with both 5-volt and 12-volt DC power. Google's designs supply only 12-volt power, with the necessary conversions taking place on the motherboard.
That adds $1 or $2 to the cost of the motherboard, but it's worth it not just because the power supply is cheaper, but because the power supply can be run closer to its peak capacity, which means it runs much more efficiently.
<<<
Was wondering when someone would figure that out.
.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

AHHHHH!!!
They are using Death-Stars!!!

[mockingbird]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Death Star, the finest Magyar engineering.

[Wizard]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Deathstars? That was loooong ago and it is done with. The big issue is handling with due care; handling, cooling and no unecessarily parking all the time unless this HD have ramp parking, I know WD do not, Hitachi/IBM HDs 3.5" series always have ramp parking and recent Seagate may have, but have to look into these eventually.

I currently use Hitachi/IBM HDs in many machines in pata and SATA. I was very disappointed that new pata 2.5" drives disappeared from local store's inventory. This means shopping on ebag because I have many notebooks that aren't SATA except for my netbook.

The WD I bought recently is not spinning nice (more of a buzz indicating imbalance than a hum) as others and I'm still regarding them with some suspicion.

Seagate is my second choice as long as I know which is good one.

Cheers, Wizard

[smason]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

You guys use sata/ide in your servers? I only see enterprise drives, SAS, SCSI, FC, etc. .

Finally the voice of reason! Yes, anything critical in business is going to be a real enterprise SAS or SCSI drive. I've had zero SCSI/SAS server drive failures in 8 years at my current gig.

I made the mistake of cheaping out one year when the budget was low, and used SATA drives in a less critical server, when I knew better.
Won't do that again. Do it right or don't do it at all.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Deathstars? That was loooong ago and it is done with. The big issue is handling with due care; handling, cooling and no unecessarily parking all the time unless this HD have ramp parking, I know WD do not, Hitachi/IBM HDs 3.5" series always have ramp parking and recent Seagate may have, but have to look into these eventually.

I currently use Hitachi/IBM HDs in many machines in pata and SATA. I was very disappointed that new pata 2.5" drives disappeared from local store's inventory. This means shopping on ebag because I have many notebooks that aren't SATA except for my netbook.

The WD I bought recently is not spinning nice (more of a buzz indicating imbalance than a hum) as others and I'm still regarding them with some suspicion.

Seagate is my second choice as long as I know which is good one.

Cheers, Wizard

In Laptop drives I prefer Seagate to WD.

[Scenic]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Not likely. Maybe some of the really early ones.

http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...tal_WD1001FALS
http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...gital_WD15EADS
http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...gital_WD10EADS
http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...gital_WD20EADS
http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...gital_WD10EACS

just a couple of the more recent ones. icons are self-explanatory

[...] no unecessarily parking all the time unless this HD have ramp parking, I know WD do not [...]

all recent WDs have parking ramps. that's actually the problem described in the first post (HDD parks heads on ramps after just 8 seconds, which leads to insane load/unload cycle SMART values after a while)

Deathstars? That was loooong ago and it is done with.

agreed. the actual "deathstars" were IBM DTLA-series (about 10 years ago)

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

agreed. the actual "deathstars" were IBM DTLA-series (about 10 years ago)

I've had excessive troubles with IBM/Hitachi 3.5" drives both before and after the DTLA-series so I'll continue to call them all Death-Star and avoid them when I can thank you very much.

OTOH: I've usually had good experiences with their laptop drives.
[I still get Seagate when I buy laptop drives though.]

Q:
There were one or two series of IBM/Hitachi 2.5" laptop drives that had 'issues' and I have forgotten which ones.
Does anyone remember?
Thanks.

.

[japlytic]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

My daughter had a drive like that which failed.
So now I know the most likely cause of failure.

[Scenic]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

Q:
There were one or two series of IBM/Hitachi 2.5" laptop drives that had 'issues' and I have forgotten which ones.
Does anyone remember?
Thanks.

i only know of their proprietary 1.8" IDE HDDs dying like flies (average lifetime was about 6-9 months before the click of death or something equally fatal)

they were used in Thinkpad X40/41 Tablet PCs aswell as the Dell Latitude D400 or D410 Subnotebooks IIRC

[ratdude747]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

???

the d400 and 410 use 2.5" IDE drives.

[c_hegge]

Re: Important Memo regarding WD Caviar Green drives

I've had excessive troubles with IBM/Hitachi 3.5" drives both before and after the DTLA-series so I'll continue to call them all Death-Star and avoid them when I can thank you very much.

OTOH: I've usually had good experiences with their laptop drives.
[I still get Seagate when I buy laptop drives though.]

+1

Fujitsu is the same. Horrible 3.5" HDDs (well, back when they used to make 3.5" HDDs), but good 2.5" ones. WD are the opposite. Excellent 3.5", unreliable 2.5". Seagate gets both right and samsung gets both wrong.