WD Green Standby

[HammerBot]

There have been written a lot about WD Green Caviar and Standby / spin-down. But I still have not been able to figure this out.

I have 3 WD Green drives:

WD15EADS - 1.5TB 32MB Cache - Firmware 01.00A01
WD10EACS - 1.0TB 16MB Cache - Firmware 01.01A01
WD10EAVS - 1.0TB 8MB Cache - Firmware 01.01A01

All drives does not behave as expected under linux using the hdparm -S command to set the spin down time.

All drives spin down immediately with the hdparm -Y command.

For the WD15EADS, hdparm -S 3 /dev/sdx, makes the drive spin down after 10 min. (The expected behavior would be 15 seconds)

For the WD10EAVS, hdparm -S 3 /dev/sdx, makes the drive spin down after about 15-20 min. (Haven't timed it accurately, but it works consistently)

However, the WD10EACS does not spin down at all.

What can cause this? The WD10EACS only differs from the WD10EAVS by the amount of cache. It even has the same firmware revision.

This is tested under Debian Linux and the drives are empty. I'm certain I don't have anything accessing the drives which can keep them active.

BTW: For all drives the dreaded idle3 timer is disabled. Apparently none of the drives support Advanced Power Management (hdparm -B /dev/sdx gives APM_level = not supported)

 

[jsmithepa]

Am not 100% sure but I don't think today's HDs are compatible with those old Acoustic Management Apps. I remember seeing the s.m.a.r.t. printout on my RED and it says Acoustic Management NO SUPPORTED.

I played with the Seagates ST series terabytes and all attempt to make them to sleep as I desire failed. A search on the web finds me, Acoustic Management Disable.

The newer (less than 2 years?) greens suppose to have a sleep timeout max of 5 minutes Or Disable, using WD's own WDidle3 utility. At this point am doubting very much you can custom tweak them to anything else.

 

[HammerBot]

You are mixing things up. Acoustic management can be changed with hdparm, but this is not what I'm doing. Acoustic management reduces noise when the drive is active. I think it does this by reducing the acceleration of the drive heads.
Spin down time is a different parameter and my Seagate Baracuda (among others) support that and behaves as expected (when APM is set >127).
The idle3 timer is another thing all together and is only found on some WD drives. It controls when the head should park and can be responsible for high load cycle count in the SMART report.