All, I urge that the storage-fixup package be part of the default pattern for installs. (I have no idea how that is controlled.) It's been part of openSUSE since at least 11.1, but I don't think it does anything if the user doesn't know to install it. == details The below discussion led me to look into the storage-fixup package. It looks at DMI, and HAL properties to decide if a hard drive needs special life-extending handling. The primary concern is that some drives will "unload" the heads extremely aggressively and use up their lifetime supply of unloads in less than a year. I think the full package is only 20 KB or less installed. The /etc/storage-fixups.conf file is reletively small and only has a set of equipment that clearly has the problem. You can do a test install via "zypper in storage-fixups". More about Stefan's Green drive below: On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Stefan Seyfried <stefan.seyfried@googlemail.com> wrote:

...

On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:01:09 -0600 Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net> wrote:

...

As this drive was my second WD Green 1 TB drive, I did not expect any problems, thus I installed, partitioned, and formatted it normally. Only when the performance took a major hit did I discover the nuances of the model number.

Now you're scaring me. Which WD Green 1TB drives are 4k and which are old-fashioned?

I have a WD10EADS and it has only one partition on it:

server:~ # parted /dev/sdc print Model: ATA WDC WD10EADS-00L (scsi) Disk /dev/sdc: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B

Assuming the drive is telling the truth, its the traditional style 512B physical sector.

The new drives should report 512B/4096B I believe.

But those green drives are nasty regardless.  They tend to have very short idle periods before unloading the head.  I've even seen error reports in windows where they cause applications to malfunction. Truly bad drives IMHO.

I think the smart param that tracks the issue is Load_Cycle_Count. Most drives are only rated for 50,000 or so of those per lifetime. The green drives without special handling under linux will use those up in a year.

Personally I just avoid the green drives like the plague, but since you have one you should look  into  Load_Cycle_Count and if its too high get your drive added to "storage.fixup"  I don't know if that's in kernel or userspace, but it is a config file, etc. that is used to tell the linux kernel that the drive is not well behaved and to take special action to keep it from unloading the heads excessively.

Tejun Heo is the maintainer for storage.fixup I believe.

Greg

I just researched this a bit. If you need storage-fixup, it is its own package. zypper in storage-fixup It installs a config file /etc/storage-fixup.conf I see several WD drives in there, but not yours. I'm not sure if that is good or bad news! Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org