2TB WD20EARS HCL Advanced Format 4k Sectors TLER LCC WDidle3

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.

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