Best Make of Sata Drive for Linux

John Mellor john.mellor at gmail.com
Sun Jan 2 01:28:59 UTC 2011


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 at 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.



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