I've had two WD 2TB Caviar green drives fail in my Drobo. This happened on pretty new drives after only a couple of months usage. Googling the internet shows I'm not alone and the culprit seems to be the power saving features on the drive. The idle3 timer causes the drive to park the head after 8 seconds of idle time. On a RAID setup, it seems that this causes the drive to do this many times per day and as a result, they seem to fail because they park much too often and the drive dies prematurely as a result.
I downloaded a WD utility called WDIDLE3 which when you boot from DOS, allows you to see what the current IDLE3 setting is as well as change or disable it. All my WD Caviar green drives (I've looked at 6 tonight) were set to 8 seconds. I could disable the timer on my two 1TB drives. The 2TB and 1.5TB drives I could only set the timer to 62 minutes. The "WDIDLE3 /D" command does this.
Whether this really makes a difference to the drives reliability time will tell but this is the conventional wisdom right now.
Came across this as I'm considering getting two 2TB Caviar Green 7200 RPM drives (WD20EADS) for my Drobo 4-bay. I'm guessing these may have an issue in a RAID situation (soft- or hardware).
Did the above procedure solve the problem? And how do you boot to DOS in a Win7x64 setup with drives in the Drobo?
Posted by: BoogieNYC | July 21, 2010 at 08:41 AM
It's now August and I haven't had any problems since doing this, touch wood.
Posted by: Billy Newport | August 17, 2010 at 05:38 PM