GreenPower disk drives - ironic and false

[Tom Metro]

Rich Braun wrote:
> ...Western Digital GreenPower model.
> the smartctl command reports Load_Cycle_Count of 5680
> after a few weeks of operation--about one spinup per hour.
> One drive has already failed.
> 
> I'm posting this to either (a) get suggestions on fixing this, or (b) to warn
> others away from buying this model of drive if you're buying it based on the
> "green" marketing blurb.

Good to know. Unfortunately I just bought a couple of these. These are 
the drives I previously mentioned on the list that I was looking to 
"burn in" before deploying them.

I'm less concerned with their ability to achieve their green claims and 
more concerned with the early failure you observed. As far as the power 
savings go, have you performed any measurements? Supposedly these drives 
vary the rotational speed to save power, so you get some power savings 
without having to do a full spin down. (I didn't research this claim any 
further, as the power saving feature wasn't my top concern. Obviously 
for a rarely used drive, a full spin down will save more power than just 
reducing the speed.)

So far the SMART conveyance, short, and long tests have all passed. I 
first tried running the conveyance test in captive mode, but that 
aborted quickly with a controller reset failure. Looking into it, this 
seems to be somewhat common with captive tests. Apparently any I/O on 
the controller will cause the test to abort. Switching to a usual 
background (online) test, it completed fine.

I did run into a problem when I tried to turn on offlineauto:

# smartctl -d ata --smart=on --offlineauto=on --saveauto=on /dev/sdg
[...]
=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===
SMART Enabled.
SMART Attribute Autosave Enabled.
Error SMART Status command failed: Input/output error
Error SMART Enable Automatic Offline failed: Input/output error
Smartctl: SMART Enable Automatic Offline Failed.


The drive's capabilities list, "Auto Offline data collection on/off 
support," so it ought to work. The smartctl man page notes that this 
feature is technically obsolete, and I guess if you're using smartd to 
run periodic online tests it is probably irrelevant.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/