WD10EADS WD Caviar Green - 1TB >> excessive Load Cycle Count

lindebrand wrote:
But as I've understood this is a "problem" not only caused by the NAS right? Just that you'd like more reliable drives in a NAS? /lindebrand

This is a contentious issue - there has been a lot of discussion and (heated) debate on the other forums that I cited in the first post on this thread. I don't think it's fair to say that this problem is "caused by the NAS". It's more of an interaction between the type of disk I/O that the NAS Linux-based OS generates, and the WD green design.

The root cause is that the WD "green" design aggressively parks the heads in order to reduce power consumption. They call this feature "IntelliPark". I understand that there is an 8-second timer in the WD firmware -- if the drive has not been asked to do anything for 8 seconds, the heads get parked. It seems that the RAIDiator OS interacts with the drive frequently (some experts claim every 20 seconds or so) which briefly unparks the heads. Then after 8 seconds of no activity, Intellipark parks the heads. Rinse and repeat, with a few park/unpark cycles happening every minute. Ironically, if the NAS was doing any real work (ie copying files), the heads would never get a chance to park, and thus the Load Count would not keep growing.

Frankly, I do not know if this behavior makes the Caviar Green drives any less reliable. We won't really know until a couple years from now whether there are large numbers of drives failing with huge LCC counts.