File system check 100% of last 24 hours

miogpsrocks wrote:
My understanding is that a green drive does certain things to save power that results in the drive being damaged in the process. The power savings are laughable between a green drive vs a normal drive.

My understanding is quite different. A green drives runs at a lower spindle rate. It also parks the heads when the drive is not being accessed. The standard tuning for head parking is set up for the Windows OS - but under linux/raid the heads park too quickly - creating a lot of load cycles very quickly. There are tools available to reset the threshold so drive does not have rapid load cycles.

If you have other information on this, please post it.

miogpsrocks wrote:
May I ask why you don't think my issue was specific to green drives?

Because I have seen a similar failure which did not involve a green drive.

I am a home NAS user, with 16 drives running in various ReadyNAS - 4 of which are old green drives (WD20EARS). These have ~42000 power-on hours with the out-of-the-box settings with no problems. I have another 5 green drives running in various desktop PCs. Overall, the failure rates I have seen with green drives is lower than what I've seen with ordinary consumer drives. I don't use enterprise drives, so I don't have any personal experience with their failure rates.

Today I am deploying WDC Red drives instead of WDC Green (and 4 of the PC green drives were originally in my ReadyNAS). The Red drives are intended for NAS use (and the WD specifically does not recommend their Green drives for NAS). That simplifies any warranty issues, and avoids the need to adjust head-parking thresholds. The Reds also run at less then 7200 rpm, and have similar power use to the Greens. My oldest Red drives have ~23000 power-on-hours.

Whether power savings are "laughable" or not depends on point of view I guess. For me, the main gain is the lower operating temperatures I see in the ReadyNAS enclosures (not the savings on my electricity bill).