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

[eelhc]

Does vortexbox 1.3 support the WD20EARS hard drive out of the box now or does it require special format (sector size?) prior to install?

[andrew]

You need to set the start sector for and 4k physical drive such as the EARS series.

[SevenFour]

Andrew said:


You need to set the start sector for and 4k physical drive such as the EARS series.



I am considering this drive for my coming vortexbox installation. Do I still need to manually set these when (before?) installing v1.9?

[SPC CHEESE]

I installed VortexBox to a WD20EARS with no issues. This is from WD:

"Western Digital has been working with the Linux kernel development teams and with the vendors of the some of the more popular Linux distributions. Starting with Linux Kernel Version 2.6.34, the latest stable kernel release, the default installations will align partitions to the most appropriate boundaries on Advanced Format disk drives. For example, the following distributions will default to good alignment for Advanced Format disk drives: Ubuntu 10.04, Fedora 13, Redhat 6 and derived products." -http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5655-

Since VortexBox 1.9 is based on Fedora 14, I assume that a default install is all that's nececary with these advanced format (4KB sector) drives.

*

Hope this helps,

Chris

[SevenFour]

Thank you!

[SPC CHEESE]

No prob, the WD20EARS is cool and quiet at an awesome price! I'd buy two WD20EARS and a USB enclosure. Then you can rsync to the second WD20EARS in the USB enclosure with VortexBox's built-in backup via the GUI.

[nomism]

Ok i am a*complete novice, and disabled to boot,so an idea was to build a nas unit to install my cd and photograph collections, thus making things a bit easier,but things are not going as planed.

I purchased an HP prolient microserver,the price was excellent,along with this i have 2x WD20EARS 2TB HDD's. I also have an Acer 3731 touch screen pc to enable easy selection of music etc.I must admit i am totally baffled.*

I have down loades the latest version of VB, i have followed the quick set up guide,but nothing seems to work. So some guidance is required.

First a couple of questions, is the Acer a suitable interface,what program is*recommended*to enable the playing of music,and an important one for me,can the digital signal go straight into a DAC for my HiFi?

So now you've stopped laughing thinking you've a complete plonker here,

let me in on this*secret of how Vortexbox works**

[SPC CHEESE]

Update on my experience with the WD20EARS. After recently noticing a clock-like clunking sound from the HDD I checked SMART data and the load cycle count was over 300,000 on a drive that only has 2,000 hours on it. The fixes recommended by Western Digital are here: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/an...../a_id/5357 and here: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/an.....hLaw%3D%3D

Ultimately I used WD's RE2GP Idle Mode Update Utility to adjust the Idle3 from 8 seconds to 5 minutes via "wdidle3.exe /s300" However, at first I tried disabling Idle3 via "wdidle3.exe /d" although WD's tool claimed it was successful SMART still showed the LCC was like a gas meter still counting up every 8 seconds or so.

After setting Idle3 to 5 minutes my WD20EARS isn't unloading the heads every 8 seconds, it's also quiet again.* This has to be done in MS DOS, but it's easy especially if you use the Ultimate Boot CD with WDIDLE3 Util included from here: http://www.jzab.de/content/ult.....l-included

FYI: For a SMART report from your VortexBox CLI enter "smartctl -a /dev/sda" and you're looking for 193 Load_Cycle_Count and you'll see if it's an issue. And like I said mine was over 300,000. I have hard drives with over 20,000 hours on them with a LCC of less than 5,000 so, it was very alarming to me to be over 300,000 in 2,000 hours.

*

Hope this helps,
Chris

[I_I_R]

Chris,

After reading your post, I decided to check my VBA (bought from VB UK in August last year) as I knew it contained a WD20EARS. The LCC count is already over 425,000.

If VBAs are still being supplied with this HDD, shouldn't the VB suppliers (Small Green Computers, Vortexbox UK etc..) consider setting the Idle3 prior to dispatch?

[SPC CHEESE]

Western Digital say's the drives are validated for a million load/unloads and some say it could go much, much higher. Regardless, I'd assume the drive would still have the 3 year warranty if one had problems. The fix is quite easy, just back up your data beforehand (just incase). And be sure to use "wdidle3.exe /s300" in lieu of "wdidle3.exe /d" which doesn't work for my WD20EARS and I've seen others claim the same.

I wonder if there are any confirmed reports of one of these drives failing prematurely due to a high LCC? I've searched and can't find anything about a failure do to LCC and/or RMAing the drive for that reason.