insane high Local Cycle Count after expansion

This is a real problem. A few years ago, I installed several WD Green drives in an Ultra 6+, with drive model numbers on the HCL. After 3 months my LCC's were at 250,000. If I was at a 250,000 in 3 months, it's not hard to figure where I'd be at a couple of years.

I did remove the drives and run wdidle. This was not a trivial matter for me, as I to remove drives from a PC with SATA ports, install the Green Drives, boot the PC from a DOS disk with wdidle3 installed on it, and run wdidle33. Wdidle3 will only do its thing if the drives are directly connected to the PC's internal SATA ports (some folks say that an external eSATA port also sometimes works, but I haven't tried this). Further, wdidle will change the settings on all WD drives installed, you cannot select individual disks. So, to be prudent, you have to remove any WD drives you don't wish to tweak from your PC before running wdidle3.

Most of this is a problem with WD. It is beyond me how they can sell "Red" drives, which are explicitly designed and marketed for NAS units, which have the LCC problem.

But Netgear also has a problem. They make a point of promising that drives on the HCL are checked and validated for use in Readynas products. The opening statement of the official HCL on the readynas web site is "You trust us to protect your data so we take it upon ourselves to list only drives that have passed our stringent disk qualification test. Because of that, you will not see all available drives here — rather only the ones that are proven to show acceptable reliability in our lab."

Netgear needs stand by this, which means they need to pay attention to the LCC issue.

And Netgear needs to provide a built in (or official add-in) tool for both current and legacy Readynas systems that will run wdidle3 (or rather the Linux equivalent) on WD drives, so users don't have to go through the logistical hassles of removing drives, installing them in PC's, running Wdidle3, etc.

From what I've read, other NAS vendors actually have OS's which automatically set the idle value to something appropriate for their NAS's. The user doesn't have to be concerned.

As for me, there aren't a whole lot of drive manufacturer''s out there any more, but I'm sticking with Seagate. I won't buy a WD drive for any of my three readynas systems.

WDC Red Drives initially had the head parking thresholds set correctly for ReadyNAS. That changed just a couple of months ago.