HDD life issues

[Altimes]

Recently had an older WD Red in NAS start to fail. Caused me to wonder how the WD Blue in the T4 might be going.

OK, so I ran the smart short and long checks and it all looks good. However.......

Looking at the stats it showing just under 40,000 hours power on - about 4.5 years - which is about right since it is our "always on" Wiz.
It is also showing a Load_Cycle_Count parameter of just under 145,000. Some back of envelope arithmetic shows that to be about 4 times an hour on average. Which, in a very broad brush sense, would correlated with the 15 minute update cycle to ICE TV, though I understand that correlation is NOT causation.

Doing some investigation in, that "source of infinite truth", the internet, brings up that Load_Cycle_Count is a measure of how often the heads are parked and that WD have some built in timers to park the head (if I read it correctly) after 8 secs of idle. There is the idle3ctl which allows the reading and setting of some WD drives.

Does anyone have knowledge of good, bad or indifferent regarding value head parking or changed their parking times?

Alan.

(OK, so it is a wet Sunday in Sydney )

[MrQuade]

I doubt very much that the head parking count is a parameter that needs to be worried about.
Parking a head just means placing it in a location where it will not crash into filled areas of the spinning platter when the drive is spun down. If the drive isn't spinning down, then hovering over the parking area is not any different to hovering over any other place.

[prl]

It is also showing a Load_Cycle_Count parameter of just under 145,000.

According to this WD data sheet, WD Blue drives are rated for 300000 Load/unload cycles.

So you're a bit less than halfway there.

Some back of envelope arithmetic shows that to be about 4 times an hour on average. Which, in a very broad brush sense, would correlated with the 15 minute update cycle to ICE TV, though I understand that correlation is NOT causation.

IIRC, the IceTV plugin doesn't need to access the HDD, unless debug logging is enabled.

Does anyone have knowledge of good, bad or indifferent regarding value head parking or changed their parking times?

I don't know much about the detailed mechanics of HDDs, but if the heads are already in the parked position, the drive won't need to do an emergency head retract if the HDD power is cut off (like in a power outage).

[Altimes]

WD Blue drives are rated for 300000 Load/unload cycles.

So after 9 years it will have reached its nominal life Not really going to be a big deal is it? The poor hardworking T4 may well have reached its own end of life before then. Diagnostics are sometimes more alarming than useful. When you see big numbers there is a tendency to want to understand why.

It was curious to see that my first reporting of the smart parameters showed that I have never bothered to do any smart diagnostics on the drive in the Wiz, whilst I know that I irregularly run them on PC disks which get less hours of usage.

My thoughts on ICE related to the idle thought of hmm, heads being parked every 15 minutes..... is there anything that *might* have a 15 minute frequency.

Regards,

Alan.

[peteru]

For some people the excessive load/unload cycles have been a problem. It wears out the mechanism and causes head instability. Some people had drives fail within a year due to this. You may get lucky and have a drive that lasts. Like this 1TB WD that is still going:

Code: Select all

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     POSR-K   200   200   051    -    3
  3 Spin_Up_Time            POS--K   116   113   021    -    7166
  4 Start_Stop_Count        -O--CK   100   100   000    -    86
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   PO--CK   200   200   140    -    0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         -OSR-K   200   200   000    -    0
  9 Power_On_Hours          -O--CK   001   001   000    -    96515
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        -O--CK   100   253   000    -    0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count -O--CK   100   253   000    -    0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       -O--CK   100   100   000    -    84
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK   200   200   000    -    47
193 Load_Cycle_Count        -O--CK   001   001   000    -    2038822
194 Temperature_Celsius     -O---K   115   096   000    -    32
196 Reallocated_Event_Count -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   ----CK   200   200   000    -    0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   ---R--   200   200   000    -    1

That's over 2 million cycles - well above the 300,000 rating.