Western Digital Green Drives?

[donschjr]

I'm using a 1 tb WD green drive for my storage drive and have no issues with buffering or stuttering. I can play HD video while other programs are recording or just watching. The only annoying thing I find is the drive is slow spinning up from a sleep state but once I'm using it I have no problems. I didn't do any special kinds of formating just left XP format it in NTFS.

[SLR_65]

My 1.5tb returned from WD last week.

I was a bit miffed - they give ya a bunch of stuff about proper packaging and stuff. I had a really nice, sturdy box from Seagate that was filled with foam with just a spot big enough for the hd hollowed out, so I used that to send my drive back in. When the replacement arrived it was in a tiny box and just has two chintzy plastic squares molded to fit each end! I want my Seagate box back!!!

The replacement drive has, knock on wood, been working fine. I was able to get all my files loaded back on to it without an issue and so far play back has been fine.

I use a Seagate 750gb for the system drive and for the recordings made off my tuners. Things I want to keep I edit to get rid of commercials, etc. and then conver them over to xvid or x264 avi and then I copy those avis over to the big 1.5tb storage drive, so I've never recorded directly to the big drive. It just receives files and plays them. I can be playing a file off of it though and loading files on to it at the same time and not have any problems at all.

Like I said, it ran for months just fine, then started stuttering but not throwing up any errors, then it started throwing up i/o errors and locking up the main htpc that was serving the files (you don't see the errors on the client pc or the popcorn hours, it's just displayed on the machine with the WD drive that's serving the files), so if you got one of these drives and suddenly started having stuttering problems I'd probably pull my files off of it and rma it quick!

Steve

[tvshowman]

hey

wow their are a lot of people with these problem...

for an update on my end... i don't even have the hard drive in my pvr anymore lol. I actually have it in a usb shell on my quad core pc and it's about 1.1 ter filled up and have a few .ts files I was converting to mkv files and that was months ago and never bothered to put it back over to the pvr.

The drive works fine if you are doing anythng other than what I did in the pvr. (encoding watching movies)

I am aware of a western digital program to set or disable the idle timer so if you want to see where your wd stands please report here your findings and then disable the idle timer and see if your stuttering problem improves.

WDIDLE3 Version 1.00 for DOS

Code:

DESCRIPTION
- DOS Level utility to setup or report the idle3 value.


FEATURES
- Scan for all drives. Non-WD Drives shall only show the model and serial
  numbers.
- Uses a Vendor Specific Command to set or get the idle3 timer.
- Timer can be set from 100 ms to 25.5 seconds, in 100ms increments.


USAGE
WDIDLE3 [/S[<Timer>]] [/D] [/R] [/?]
where:
/S[<Timer>] Set timer, units in 100 milliseconds (1 to 255). Default=80.
/D          Disable timer.
/R          Report current timer.
/?          This help info.

DOS ERRORLEVEL
0     No error
1     Drive problem
254   Internal program error
255   Invalid command line argument

here
old ftp link removed

I just found the site on google after trying to remember what the program was from my research a long time ago. I never tried the program since I use ntfs and I didn't want to bother making a boot disc and adding the program. It looks like the guy here has included a nero iso file so I bet that is the boot cd already for you

I hope this is the miracle file cause if it works I will be motivated to anker that paperwait back into the pvr again

[tvshowman]

ok here may be the problem...

OP from the thread:

Quote:As per SPCR recommendation and nice-sounding specs I and multiple of my friends have bought Western Digital Green Power drives in past half a year. Because the drive is particularly suited for media server applications, this is where the drives have seen their use.

But, alas, within past month news began to hit in that the feature in WD GP drives that helps to save energy, Intelli-Park, is not that intelligent. In fact, with default settings it parks the heads after 8 seconds of inactivity. What this means depends of your OS and usage pattern, but in these low-usage media server machines running Linux it means the drive will reach it's designed lifetime total or parkings in 200-300 days.

What makes things worse is that WD has been completely silent about the issue, and the tool that can disable the Intelli-Park feature is not publicly available. Ie. WD is doing their best to just let the drives die instead of warning the customers about the issue.

What to do? If you are using Green Power drive, check the SMART data to see if your drive has alarmingly high Load_Cycle_Count value. For my WD10EACS drive the count is 87k after two months of usage - almost one third of the designed lifespan spent. If you drive has a high value, contact WD and ask for the wdidle3.exe. It's a DOS program that can disable the Intelli-Park or configure it.

It might also be worth putting a mention about this to the SPCR review recommending GP drives so that people can prepare from the very beginning and thus prevent untimely death of their drive.
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/printt...?tid=20686

If I recall correctly when searching google for people with problems similar to mine that there were people having real problems when using these in raid configs.

I should add thet my cheaper seagate 1.5tb bought before this drive is working happily all through this without a hiccup and i only bought the green drive since it was on sale for the week at the exact price of the seagate so I thought it must be better haha -wrong

edit

widdle3 link here
http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show...u&q_id=407

[tvshowman]

I hope the mods don't get too mad at me for so many added posts. Man there is a lot of new information and tools out there that I just didn't have or find back when I had the problem months ago.

check this out

Doanload a trial of hdtune
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

Install that and choose the green drive and see what info you get. Mine is definately wonky. Look at pic.

sigh

how's your doing? hmm... gonna run this on my seagate in the pvr...

hold on while I install it there so I don't have to make another post

hehe sry sub about that.

back......

ok I included both drives in my pvr seagates 1.5tb and 500g

I need to read the manual to learn what the heck I am looking at. I am interested in the operating hours and how many times the drive has been booted.

I rarely used the green dive and it already has bad sectors. My pvr drives are much much older and suffer from seek errors which I imagine are caused by the huge demand I put on my system with encoding so not a big deal

[hoborg]

I got 2TB WD GreenPower 3.5" AV-GP ~2 mounths ago. Disc is used to store data only. Great piece of hardware i my eyes.

[tvshowman]

now it's starting to become clearer what the problem is the guys are having on the net with these drives....

the drives green features support windows and mac only and not linux. Well if you put one of these suckers in your nas box (Network attached Storage box) which are pretty much linux boxes then the load cycle count goes through the roof and the drives rated 300k cycle gets used up in only 6 months.... good grief.
read the rant here:
http://www.naschenweng.info/2008/12/04/w...reen-drive

Now my question....

I got this thing in a simple usb box so does that count as being safe or am I getting hosed for not being in the motherboard's green panel?

Some interesting facts on my drives status.
power on status 2134 = 88 days
load count = 3457

My 320g computer in my office:
power on status = 16326 = 680 days
load count = 681

I just realized the green drive was used in the pvr for only about 23 days. temp folder recordings (sept 25 09 - oct 18 09) when I had weird problems so I have not been using it much after that so the other 50 days are just idling in the usb box. hmm I better unplug the lug nutt

[BigMoose]

Thanks for the posts on this. Tried the wdidle3 prog and had mixed results. Sometimes it just hangs, others it reports the idle timer or lets me set it but it really isn't predictable. I've managed to increase it to 30s (from the default of 8). The disable option only ever hung as did setting it to >25 (which oddly claimed it was then set to 30s after using this value). I'm not sure it's made a lot of difference. The really weird thing is that I only get the issue watching HD content, SD seems fine. I'd expect the reverse if it was reading too little data between head parks.

[rowle1jt]

I have one... but I don't like it.

I have a 1tb and it gave me the same stuttering/skip/pause issues. I now use it as a storage drive and wish I would have spent a couple more bucks and gotten a blue or black edition.