Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rate
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Shame on them for using consumer hard drives and pawning that off as a cloud solution.
You buy cheap, you get cheap.
Remind me not to use Backblaze as a cloud provider.
Backblaze's business plan—using cheap HDDs and replacing them frequently instead of more expensive HDDs and replacing them less frequently—may seem counterintuitive, if not downright wacky, but it is working for them. If set up properly in nested arrays (and maybe even georedundancy) with sufficient hot spares to keep up with the higher failure rates, data stored in a server using pure garbage drive caqn be kept safe. If Backblaze's business model wasn't working and people lost data, they would have gone out of business a long time ago.
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Must mean the server grade isn't any or much better :)
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If you use wdidle3 to set the hard parking to 300 seconds (5 minutes) the drives will last a lot longer.
The only direct WD link I have for wdidle3 is this
http://supportdownloads.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=113
My 2TB Greens are WD20EZRX. These aren't on the list and WD suggest the firmware change could damage the drive. I tried another WD utility in the past (not firmware change & I can't remember the name of the software) for changing parking times but it apparently worked on all other WD drives except Greens.
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Mjf, have a look at the link I posted earlier to freenas, you'll see that most people have used the wdidle3 utility to change the head Park time on Green drives with no ill effects.
Haven't seen any reports of it bricking any drives.
I wasn't aware there was any other way of doing it.
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hdparm
Mjf, have a look at the link I posted earlier to freenas, you'll see that most people have used the wdidle3 utility to change the head Park time on Green drives with no ill effects.
Haven't seen any reports of it bricking any drives.
I wasn't aware there was any other way of doing it.
You can change the timer settings using hdparm in Linux (Terminal) .
My friend used that method on his Arch Linux PC.
I've used wdidle3 on all of my WD Green HDDs (including my new 30EZRX, last December).
Make sure that you only have one HDD connected when you use wdidle3.
It is a bit twitchy.
It failed the first time I tried on my latest HDD, but the second time worked correctly.
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Thanks for that Lehnerus, I wasn't aware of that utility. 
Yeah, I've seen a couple of reports of people keeping more than one WD drive connected when they used wdidle3 and it changed the timer on all the connected drives. 
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Mjf, have a look at the link I posted earlier to freenas, you'll see that most people have used the wdidle3 utility to change the head Park time on Green drives with no ill effects.
If I didn't have system images and other important data on these drives I'd give it ago. At the moment I'll let them do their head parking since they are on line only for backups. I must admit a default 8 sec head park is a bit aggressive. A 5 minute default would have been more sensible IMO.
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My apologies, I should have clarified that my three "Greens" were Seagate model ST2000DL003-9VT166,
purchased at the same time in 2012. They are 5900rpm spindle speed, which is where I thought the lower
running temp came in and the lower electricity use but the one that went belly up I was not just storing .avi - .mkv files on it but playing them directly in VLC and KMPlayer. Ditto for the 'movie' drive which is still healthy but as it is connected to a PCI controller card, needs a second or so to 'wake up' in explorer or for playback.
The WD, 4TB, which is the 'new' TV drive is model number WD40EZRX-00SPEB0 5400rpm, purchased at the same B&M in September 2015.
Now in the past, building PVRs, since the capture card I use was originally designed to be used in older computers [to keep them out of landfill] as owners upgraded [/w a hardware MPEG2 decoder built in] the speed of old drives didn't matter to the MDP-130s, as one poster stated, in the 'old' days the spindle speed of HDDs were 5400-5900. Back over at the card's user group consensus was that a slower drive was more preferred rather than spend the money for 7200-10000rpm or faster drives as the playback speeds [relative] were slower to begin with.
Now I'm wondering if I should just use these drives for storage and not real-time playback.
I was unaware of utilities that could alter the head parking behaviour of such drives, need to take a day
now to do some research.
{and now while I was typing, another post came in.}
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The WD Green HDDs are inexpensive.
Well, that was the attraction for me as well, both brands, every where I went, even newegg.ca..........
7200rpms were a little to a lot higher than the lower speed drives.
Lady F:
Since 2010 though I've been using SSDs as boot drives, since I picked up a bunch of 30gig Kingstons back then, but now a 120gig sells for the same price, even use them in XP PVRs eventhough XP
has no native support, mainly for the low temperatures, like no hotter than 80-84F.
Plus an nLited XP is only 1.5-3gigs in size and tailored for PVR [re]booting, real fast in case of power failures, or glitches.
The Kingstons still use wear averaging internally and don't seem to care what OS is in them, so will last for years, the on-board controller is the trick, but they're not available anymore.
This machine has an ADATA 60gig to boot Win7.
Last edited by BlueGuy; 06 Feb 2016 at 00:23.
Reason: more info
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