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2TB WD20EARS HCL Advanced Format 4k Sectors TLER LCC WDidle3
EDIT: This thread was written before the Readynas group had recognized and addressed the WD Advanced Format HDD's. An issue that remains to this day is the massive LCC(Load Cycle Count) increases due to the original HDD Firmware.
I believe the end of year 2012 WD Red drives address most of the issues that plagued the WD20EARS and WD20EARX but I have not confirmed this.
The LLC (Load Cycle Count) for a majority of my drives has now approached 3Million. Yes Three Million.
There appears to be a New WD20EARS-00MVWB0 which has 3 Platters. As yet untested. http://forums.vr-zone.com/hardware-aren ... etter.html
WDidle3_1_05.zip info works with WD20EARS HDD's viewtopic.php?p=233472#p233472
WD20eaRs HDD's 4KB Alignment issues appears to be FIXED with firmware 4.2.12-T9 viewtopic.php?p=238394#p238394
The SPARC 4KB Fixed Alignment firmware version is looking to be done by July 2010 as mentioned here. viewtopic.php?p=242472#p242472
2TB WD20EARS HCL, Advanced Format 4k Sectors, TLER(Time Limited Error Recovery), LCC(Load_Cycle_Count) info
After reading a fair bit online about the new WD Caviar Green/GP HDD's by WD such as the WD20EARS and their newish 4k sector size,
I am left wondering if the ReadyNAS firmware(existing or Beta) has been updated for this new HDD Sector design?
Could one of the JEDI or anyone else please comment on the following information?
Sorry for what appears like a jumble of information following but its hard to know where to start,
when all i really want is for it to be on the HCL as it is the only WD HDD commonly available here in Melbourne Australia.
This is a very good clear explaination about the 4096B Sector size that replace the historical 512B size
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888
Western Digital Advanced Format What WD have to say which is not very helpful when it comes to linux.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/index.asp
I have read that TLER is enabled on the WD20EARS. Can anyone here confirm(x seconds) as info is conflicting?
Also the old HDD utilities for spinup and TLER are no longer supported by WD for the EARS drives.
Knowledge Base WD Caviar Green / GP
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?g ... 08&lang=en
From what I have read do not use the 7-8 Jumper for XP compatibility mode due to more than single partition issue.
Jumper Settings WD20EARS
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... ed=#jumper
ReadyNAS related Fix? Is this already implemented?
Linux Fix according to WD knowledge base
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... faqid=5357
Problem: The Load/Unload counter for S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 continues to increase under some distributions of the Linux Operating system.
Any Links I have missed please add, especially form here.
I believe the end of year 2012 WD Red drives address most of the issues that plagued the WD20EARS and WD20EARX but I have not confirmed this.
The LLC (Load Cycle Count) for a majority of my drives has now approached 3Million. Yes Three Million.
There appears to be a New WD20EARS-00MVWB0 which has 3 Platters. As yet untested. http://forums.vr-zone.com/hardware-aren ... etter.html
WDidle3_1_05.zip info works with WD20EARS HDD's viewtopic.php?p=233472#p233472
WD20eaRs HDD's 4KB Alignment issues appears to be FIXED with firmware 4.2.12-T9 viewtopic.php?p=238394#p238394
The SPARC 4KB Fixed Alignment firmware version is looking to be done by July 2010 as mentioned here. viewtopic.php?p=242472#p242472
2TB WD20EARS HCL, Advanced Format 4k Sectors, TLER(Time Limited Error Recovery), LCC(Load_Cycle_Count) info
After reading a fair bit online about the new WD Caviar Green/GP HDD's by WD such as the WD20EARS and their newish 4k sector size,
I am left wondering if the ReadyNAS firmware(existing or Beta) has been updated for this new HDD Sector design?
Could one of the JEDI or anyone else please comment on the following information?
Sorry for what appears like a jumble of information following but its hard to know where to start,
when all i really want is for it to be on the HCL as it is the only WD HDD commonly available here in Melbourne Australia.
This is a very good clear explaination about the 4096B Sector size that replace the historical 512B size
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888
With the emulation of 512B sectors, there’s the risk that a partition could be misaligned compared to the 4K physical sectors - where it would be unwittingly started in the middle of such a sector. As a result, the clusters of a file system on that partition would end up straddling 4K sectors, which would cause performance problems.
In order to solve the misalignment issue, Western Digital is offering two solutions. The first solution for correcting misaligned partitions is specifically geared towards Win 5.x, and that is an option on the drive itself to use an offset. Through the jumpering of pins 7 and 8 on an Advanced Format drive, the drive controller will use a +1 offset, resolving Win 5.xx’s insistence on starting the first partition at LBA 63 by actually starting it at LBA 64, an aligned position. This is exactly the kind of crude hack it sounds like since it means the operating system is no longer writing to the sector it thinks its writing to, but it’s simple to activate and effective in solving the issue so long as only a single partition is being used. If multiple partitions are being used, then this offset cannot be used as it can negatively impact the later partitions. The offset can also not be removed without repartitioning the drive, as the removal of the offset would break the partition table.
Western Digital Advanced Format What WD have to say which is not very helpful when it comes to linux.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/index.asp
I have read that TLER is enabled on the WD20EARS. Can anyone here confirm(x seconds) as info is conflicting?
Also the old HDD utilities for spinup and TLER are no longer supported by WD for the EARS drives.
Knowledge Base WD Caviar Green / GP
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?g ... 08&lang=en
From what I have read do not use the 7-8 Jumper for XP compatibility mode due to more than single partition issue.
Jumper Settings WD20EARS
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... ed=#jumper
ReadyNAS related Fix? Is this already implemented?
Linux Fix according to WD knowledge base
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... faqid=5357
Problem: The Load/Unload counter for S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 continues to increase under some distributions of the Linux Operating system.
Affected Models: WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS
some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal.
Solution:
The number of systems using such applications and utilities is limited and customers can resolve this symptom by optimizing their systems with the following three options depending on requirements.
Do not wake up the drives unnecessarily every 10 to 30 seconds or so, thereby gaining substantial power savings and eliminating excess activity. Increasing logging to every 2 minutes would result in 525,600 minutes per year or 262,800 cycles per year. Increase to 5 minutes and cycles would not even be a factor.
a. Linux users: Decrease the logging message
i. Examine your /etc/syslog.conf file for unnecessary logging activity and to optimize its performance. If you don't want to log any system activity, consider disabling syslogd and klogd entirely; or, at the very least, minimize the amount of logging your system performs. You can also prefix each entry with the minus sign (-) to omit syncing the file after each log entry. This will log anything with a priority of info or higher, but lower than warning, to /var/log/messages or /var/log/mail without needing to sync to disk after each write. Since we want to keep all messages with a priority of warning, this will be logged to a different file without disabling disk syncing (to prevent data loss in the event of a system crash).
*.warning /var/log/syslog
*.info;*.!warning;mail.none -/var/log/messages
mail.info;mail.!warning -/var/log/mailii. Another item to be aware of is the -- MARK -- messages that syslogd(8) writes. This will affect your hard drive inactivity settings. You can simply disable this by running syslogd(8) with:
if [ -x /usr/sbin/syslogd -a -x /usr/sbin/klogd ]; then
# '-m 0' disabled 'MARK' messages
/usr/sbin/syslogd -m 0
sleep 1
# '-c 3' displays errors on console
# '-x' turns off broken EIP translation
/usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x
fi
b. Modify OS power management timers in control panel
Disable Advanced power management using standard ATA command (Uses more power as turns off all low power modes but results in no load/unload cycles)
Linux users add following (hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdX where X is your hard drive device)
ATA users can disable APM usually controlled via BIOS and/or OS.ATA users can disable APM usually controlled via BIOS and/or OS.
Set Idle3 to max time (effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature thus will use more power) per below link
Any Links I have missed please add, especially form here.
30 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Load Cycle Count ---------- 1100346 ************* Now Over 1 Million **************
SMART Information for Disk 6
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2476xxx xxx=privacy
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate ------- 0
Spin Up Time -------------- 9400
Start Stop Count ---------- 51
Reallocated Sector Count -- 0
Seek Error Rate ----------- 0
Power On Hours ------------ 8807
Spin Retry Count ---------- 0
Calibration Retry Count --- 0
Power Cycle Count --------- 49
Power-Off Retract Count --- 24
Load Cycle Count ---------- 1100346 ************* Now Over 1 Million **************
Temperature Celsius ------- 39
Reallocated Event Count --- 0
Current Pending Sector ---- 0
Offline Uncorrectable ----- 0
UDMA CRC Error Count ------ 0
Multi Zone Error Rate ----- 0
ATA Error Count ----------- 0
I Still have some concerns over the LLC (Load/UnLoad Cycle Count). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
The typical lifetime rating for laptop (2.5-in) hard drives is 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles.
Unfortunatly the spec page from WD state otherwise. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/S ... 701229.pdf Load/unload cycles 300,000
I have been running firmware versions
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.17 since 20110508.
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.15 since 20101218.
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.13 since 20100923.
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.12 since 20100709.
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.12-T32 since 20100625.
Before this I would have to search the logs. - interesting thanks of for the updates, also leaving my drives alone lets see if they last longer than my old seagate drive which was less than 3 years being on 24x7
- Load Cycle Count(LLC) now at 2 million. ** :nashammer: **
Drive is Failing. ** :nashammer: ** Time to get a new 3TB drive maybe? and update the Firmware.SMART Information for Disk 5
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2471xxx xxx=privacy
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate ------- 3906
Spin Up Time -------------- 9200
Start Stop Count ---------- 58
Reallocated Sector Count -- 144
Seek Error Rate ----------- 0
Power On Hours ------------ 15348
Spin Retry Count ---------- 0
Calibration Retry Count --- 0
Power Cycle Count --------- 56
Power-Off Retract Count --- 29
Load Cycle Count ---------- 1998196 ************* Now At 2 Million **************
Temperature Celsius ------- 36
Reallocated Event Count --- 138
Current Pending Sector ---- 1407
Offline Uncorrectable ----- 0
UDMA CRC Error Count ------ 0
Multi Zone Error Rate ----- 605
ATA Error Count ----------- 0 - Sounds like a good idea.
I would first suggest you ensure you have an up to date backup.
You need 4.2.16 or later to use 3TB drives (update before adding 3TB drives). Note you can't go direct from firmware newer than 4.2.9 but older than 4.2.16 to 4.2.19 you have to update to 4.2.16 first. This is fixed in 4.2.20. 4.2.20-T40 (http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=57193) is pretty stable and I'd probably go with that. - I also noted that in 10 months the reallocated sector count went from 0 to 144. That's a bad sign.
- 2 million LLC and it is looking bad.
I have to get around to upgrading it soon but Im waiting for the 3Tb drives to come down in price after the floods in thailand.Tue Mar 13 04:00:33 EST 2012 Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 5: Previous count: 132 Current count: 144 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk.
Mon Mar 12 04:00:32 EST 2012 Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 5: Previous count: 89 Current count: 132 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk.
Sun Mar 11 13:41:01 EST 2012 RAID scrubbing finished on volume C.
Sun Feb 19 13:13:28 EST 2012 The on-line filesystem consistency check completed without errors for Volume C.
Mon Feb 13 04:00:32 EST 2012 Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 5: Previous count: 88 Current count: 89 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk. - The LLC (Load Cycle Count) for a majority of my drives has now approached 3Million. Yes Three Million.
For those interested it has been running for nearly 2.5 years mostly as a media server with low use but continuous power on.
I replaced a drive as I did see an increasing number in "reallocated sector count".
SMART Information for Disk 1SMART Information for Disk 1
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2587xxx
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 9308
Start Stop Count 69
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 20361
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 67
Power-Off Retract Count 36
Load Cycle Count 2811549
Temperature Celsius 36
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0
SMART Information for Disk 2SMART Information for Disk 2
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2486xxx
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 8983
Start Stop Count 50
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 19740
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 48
Power-Off Retract Count 23
Load Cycle Count 2754067
Temperature Celsius 38
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0
SMART Information for Disk 3SMART Information for Disk 3
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2503xxx
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 9183
Start Stop Count 67
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 20371
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 65
Power-Off Retract Count 34
Load Cycle Count 2812883
Temperature Celsius 36
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0
SMART Information for Disk 4SMART Information for Disk 4
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2522xxx
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 9375
Start Stop Count 67
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 20372
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 65
Power-Off Retract Count 34
Load Cycle Count 2813533
Temperature Celsius 36
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0
SMART Information for Disk 5SMART Information for Disk 5
Model: WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
Serial: WD-WCAZAD682xxx
Firmware: 51.0AB51
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 6241
Start Stop Count 13
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 4141
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 11
Power-Off Retract Count 8
Load Cycle Count 584812
Temperature Celsius 32
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0
SMART Information for Disk 6SMART Information for Disk 6
Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY2476xxx
Firmware: 80.00A80
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 9016
Start Stop Count 67
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 20315
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 65
Power-Off Retract Count 35
Load Cycle Count 2824514
Temperature Celsius 35
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0 - There is a nice how-to on changing the WDIDLE3 setting using the ReadyNAS itself here: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=59700
Next time if you go with a WD disk I'd suggest considering the new WD RED disks such as the WD30EFRX - Hi mdgm, its been a while. You may remember that it was I who first brought the Advanced Format 4k sector to the forums and many months until we had a solution from the Jedi.
Look at the top of this page @Fri May 21, 2010 5:33 am you will see I have talked about the firmware there, although I do wish the Jedi had made an addon that is press and go for everybody with these common WD20EARS drives.
Changing firmware in the past but it meant pulling the HDD one at a time for me and I didn't have time for any issues.
The WD Red HDD are the ones I am looking at getting now but I'm waiting for the 4TB ones to come out. - WD doesn't support using Green disks in NAS units and they aren't on the compatibility list any more so I don't think we'll see an add-on. So the solution via SSH or hooking the drive up to a PC (and using WDIDLE3.exe) would be the way to go if you want to change the WDIDLE3 setting.
I just bought some 3TB RED drives and expanded my volume. 4TB disks would have pushed my unit beyond the online 8TB expansion limit plus I expect the 4TB ones will be quite expensive when they first come out. Plus my main NAS had already been full for quite some time. So I decided not to wait any longer. I can use some of the disks from my main NAS to replace some disks in another unit that have failed.
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