i also have such a drive (damn, if i knew that saving some Watts would hurt...) - and i measured ~100 load_cycle_count per hour, which is _way_ to much, imho.
if we trust the spec, the disk would be dead after ~1year.
it seems that "intellipark" is not that intelligent as it should be and a little bit too agressive.
from what i have found, the time for parking the heads is much below the linux kernel flush interval (which seems to be at 30secs), so i think the best thing to do is tuning either dirty_expire_centisecs and dirty_writeback_centisecs (defaults to 3000/500 on my system) or tune the disk parking interval , so that the disks own interval is greater than the linux flush interval.
doh - so that disk always is faster with parking it`s heads than linux default flush interval !?
btw - is that dos utility available for download somewhere?
regards
roland
List: linux-kernel
Subject: Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux
From: "Tvrtko A. Ursulin" <tvrtko () ursulin ! net>
Date: 2008-04-10 7:48:08
Message-ID: 200804100848.08442.tvrtko () ursulin ! net
[Download message RAW]
I got back from WD's tech support and received a DOS utility which can control
this drive feature, apparently using vendor specific commands. With it head
unload timer can be disabled or set to a period between 100ms and 25.5s.
Of course I asked for more than a DOS utility, but the question really is how
was this feature intended to work with Windows for example, is there
something there which would prevent such rapid load/unload cycle growth, and
why isn't it documented somewhere?
I am kind off hoping that someone from WD is reading this list and will notice
this in case my effort with tech support fails.
Tvrtko
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