Hello all, I’ve been running opensuse on my file server for a while now, and I’ve just recently migrated from a LVM to a RAID 1 (2 x WD10EADS 1tb SATA Drives). These drives are Western Digital’s green drives. I was talking to a friend about using these drives in a RAID configuration and he mentioned that they are not good because they spin down every 8 seconds and that linux will wake them up every 10 seconds. So the drives would be spinning up and down constantly, reducing the life of the drive. So here are my questions:
- is this true?
- if it is, can I tell linux to probe the drive more often so it won’t go into power save mode.
Here’s my setup:
uname -a
Linux batman 2.6.27.7-9-default #1 SMP 2008-12-04 18:10:04 +0100 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1
Serial Number: WD-WCAU4D466829
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Mon Jan 25 13:39:39 2010 EST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1
Serial Number: WD-WCAU48673626
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Mon Jan 25 13:40:26 2010 EST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
mdadm --query --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 1.00
Creation Time : Wed Nov 11 18:06:57 2009
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 976751864 (931.50 GiB 1000.19 GB)
Used Dev Size : 1953503728 (1863.01 GiB 2000.39 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Intent Bitmap : Internal
Update Time : Mon Jan 25 13:56:33 2010
State : active
Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0
Name : batman:0 (local to host batman)
UUID : 1c8d5d29:6d31a5bd:4e2f54b6:856e4880
Events : 18
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1
1 8 1 1 active sync /dev/sda1