Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB Hard Drive Support in 1.3

[andrew]

Even if it doesn't cause the drive to fail it still seems like a good idea. It's to bad *hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda doesn't seem to work. That would be much easier then booting from a DOS disk.

[andrew]

This article has a much simpler procedure to do the fix

*

http://www.ngohq.com/news/1980.....-hdds.html

[waltonb]

Thanks for that, Andrew, and others... *My VB has 4 of these WD drives in it, and I hadn't heard about this issue until this thread. (no boot, data only)

I'll try the fix when I get home tonight.

-bruce.

[Ron Olsen]

The article Andrew mentioned says the problem also applies to the WD20EADS drive, which I have in my three-year-old VBA.

I checked the Load Cycle Count by

smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load

This shows the LCC at 200,015. However, repeated checks show this number is not increasing, so I'm not going to apply the Idle3 fix.

I suggest that VB users with affected WD drives monitor the LCC over a period of time to see if it is increasing at a rapid rate. If so; apply the fix. If not, the fix may not be needed.