ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition / WD20EARS HDD's

I've been running 6 of these in my Pro... I'm pretty sure you will want to run WDIDLE on these drives so they dont spin down/up all the time. Search around the forum for posts by myself and others about this.

zackiv31 wrote:
I've been running 6 of these in my Pro... I'm pretty sure you will want to run WDIDLE on these drives so they dont spin down/up all the time. Search around the forum for posts by myself and others about this.

eesh, there are a 150+ posts on that, is there a way to narrow down your suggestion?

i downloaded the utility from WD, and have it now (HDD's aren't here yet, so i can't test), and it appears per WD they suggest the following (http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5357). which one of the three below do you recommend using?

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The S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter keeps increasing on a SATA 2 hard drive
Answer ID 5357 | Last Updated 05/16/2011

MUST READ: Western Digital is unable to provide support for the Unix/Linux operating systems outside of jumper configurations (for EIDE hard drives) and physical installation support.

Problem:
The Load/Unload counter for S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 continues to increase under some distributions of the Linux Operating system and some Windows applications.

Affected Models:
WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS

Cause:
WD drives are designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. WD defines this mode as Idle 3.

Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as 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. This can negatively impact some of the power savings associated with WD Green Power drives and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles. The increase in load/unload cycles for a typical desktop user are within design margins (drive has been validated to 1 million load/unload cycles without issue).

Solution:
The number of systems using such applications and utilities is contingent on the types of system and applications being used. If you are concerned about your system we have provided three options depending on your system to disable the feature.

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/mail

ii. 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.

Set Idle3 to max time (effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature thus will use more power) per below link.

Most of our customers do not disable the advanced power savings features. In addition to the options provided above we have also provided a utility. This utility will modify the behavior of the drive to wait longer before invoking Idle 3 mode. By disabling this feature your drive will consume additional power during periods of inactivity. This update is described in WD's Process Change Notice PCN 2579-701324-A02 (see attached PDF file).
The following article contains the download location: Answer ID 3263: The S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter continue to increase for the WD RE2-GP SATA II hard drives=

MUST READ: Western Digital is unable to provide support for the Unix/Linux operating systems outside of jumper configurations (for EIDE hard drives) and physical installation support.

When you get your drive, search these forums for the FULL model number (the stuff including after the EARS... most likely that will narrow down your search.

Still too lazy to find my posts.. but basically, I created a bootable floppy from Windows, copied WDIDLE3.EXE to it ( I believe from here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... 09&sid=113 ) and booted from it.

I did one drive at a time, and turned off the idle timer by setting it to its max... or disabling it, I can't remember which.

I'm pretty sure I did

WDIDLE3.EXE /S300

but I might have done:

WDIDLE3.EXE /D


Just run WDIDLE3.EXE /R to see what the drive is set at currently, and check it after you toggle it. You basically just want to turn it off.

ok, finally got the hdd's

i have a bootable usb key and i put the wdidle utility on it, however the laptop doesn't see the hdd when i try and change the drive letter?!?

How do you have a desktop drive in a laptop? My guess is USB.. which does not work with the wdidle utility (or really any DOS based hard drive utilies). You need a desktop.

yeah i did, i gave up on trying to do this, it's a PITA..

there should be some way to do this from the toaster, whether from Netgear or 3rd party IMHO.

Maybe there is a solution!

I have the same disks and (also) having the problem not having a desktop with a free slot for a sata2 disk. Been searching the web to find a solution changing the idle3 on the NAS itself in stead of building them in a XP (dos) system.

I found this forumpost where this solution was used on a WD My Book Live (with Linux). The program is called Idle-tools and root access is necessary. here are some links. Don't know much about Linux though.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Very-high-Load-Cycle-Count-over-5-000-in-less-than-180h/td-p/151544
http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

Hope this will help! :D