On Sat, 2011-01-01 at 16:43 -0800, suvayu ali wrote:
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 3:23 PM, John Mellor john.mellor@gmail.com wrote:
I've got a 1.5TB Western Digital Green drive, and I'm not happy with the performance of it. There are also several discussions online about these drives having an early ageing problem with ext4 filesystems because of them unloading the heads every 5 seconds and ext4 only flushing its journal every 30 seconds.
I have 2 1TB WD Black drives and one 300GB Velociraptor they all have been working almost flawlessly. Could you please point me to what kind of symptoms I might see if the above was true for my case?
PS: Did you by any chance get the unloading of heads and ext4 flushing its journals interchanged? If not, I don't see how that would be a problem.
No, the problem is that with 30-second journal flushes to a WD green drive that unloads every 5 seconds, every time Linux goes to write to the disk, the heads have already been unloaded. Loading them again takes a relatively long time, killing the performance. Also, if you look up the green drive specs, they are only good for about 100k load/unload operations, or a lot less than 2 months unless you do something about it.