Last year, I decided to upgrade my Linux Home Server by adding two spiffy new 4TB WD Green Drives. Specifically, I bought two of these: (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EHBEUZO)

It was a fairly simple process to use mdadm to create my desired RAID and I was all set. No worries or hassles for almost 7 months. Then suddenly my drives started failing with constant I/O errors.

I have generated a lot of threads seeking help around various forums online; like this thread I created when my RAID first failed.
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...failure/233544

At this point, I have already replaced one of these drives, eliminated the RAID all-together, and was about to replace the motherboard when I stumbled across some info from Western Digital regarding Load Cycle Count: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...879-771438.pdf.

The material seems to imply that these drives have a lifetime Load Cycle Count of 300,000.

Checking my drives, I can see I am in really bad shape:
http://imgur.com/8fkBW6k

One of my WD Green Drives is deader than dead. My other one is showing 260,000 load cycle count and it's not even a year old. My brand new WD Purple drive, which is only 3 weeks old is already at 4,000.

Meanwhile, my ancient Seagate 3TD drive (which is 5 years old) is only at 150.

Needless to say, I'm utterly shocked.

At this point I don't know if I should blame Western Digital or Linux. Prior to this experience I have been running Linux servers since 1998 and have never had any trouble.

One thing is clear, however, I have three Western Digital hard drives in this server (2 Green and 1 Purple) and so far one drive is completely dead. One is constantly failing and near death and the other is basically brand new, but still has 20-times the load cycle count of my 5 year old Seagate drive.

Western Digital seems to be the common factor in this equation.

The trouble with WD greens is parking the heads is done by firmware while it should be under control of OS. There is a DOS executable available from WD (methinks) one can run to disable this "feature".

I found this utility... I can't run it though since I'm rsyncing all my data to yet another drive since my second WD Green Drive failed (again) last night

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

I'm crossing my fingers that it helps...

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Hey, good find! I didn't know there is a Linux tool for this.

I will not divert this thread about WD Greens, but if looking for a good alternative you might find some useful thoughts from my own drive search in this thread. There were some very useful links provided by others in that thread.

I decided on Toshiba drives at the time and now have three of them - 2-1/2 years of heavy use on two, moderate on the third, no problems - still a very happy camper.

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The Pdf says this.
"
...
Applications
WD Green hard drives are tested and recommended for primary use in desktop and All-in-One PCs, as secondary storage for archiving, in external cases or as
reliable backup storage. Desktop drives are not recommended for use in RAID environments. Please consider using WD Red
..."

Reds park heads, too, but it is not catastrophic.

I too have encountered premature failure rates for these drives.

I had spent a lot of time setting up and configuring a Linux Mint build for a monitoring project I embarked on, only to have the system crash early in the project.

Luckily I had things backed up.

I should have listened to thund3rstruck when he told me about this anomaly a few years back.

Lesson learned I guess.

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Since executing id3ctl, the Load_Cycle_Count has only increased by a count of 6 since yesterday afternoon.

This might not save the life of my remaining Green drive, but at least it might prevent it from throwing I/O errors every other day.
We'll see....

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Thanks folks.
Mid last year I swapped out laptop hard-drive for a new one. A WD Black. Already at 189000 and counting. Damn these vendors.

Instantly fixed my response time problems. Latencytop had been showing the disk as the issue, but I thought it must be in other (old) components as the disk was new.

Damn these vendors to hell.

Wow... I thought the WD Black Drives were immune to this problem?

Not laptop drives. Laptop drives are designed to cope with huge number of head parking.

Here is smartctl for one of my laptop drives:
See that count?! Drive still working great.

I just pulled up the data on the drive I replaced in my laptop, at removal, producing errors but not yet failed:

I think I had adjusted hdparms to slow them down at some point but this works out to 19.2 retracts per hour.

The "new" drive ran for a while before I reset hdparms...

Which is >33 retracts per hour!

I reset it at that point with hdparm -B 192 and the current result is...

Which is about 8 retracts per hour since the change, or 16 per hour lifetime average, powered on 14 hours per day average.

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