GreenPower disk drives - ironic and false

[Rich Braun]

Tom wrote:
> On my WD "green" drives that have essentially sat idle for the past 3 or
> 4 weeks aside from some burn-in tests, I see:
>
> Load_Cycle_Count ...       4380
> Load_Cycle_Count ...       4442

> So not as frequent of cycling as you observed, probably because the
> drives haven't been doing anything for most of that time.

Those _are_ high numbers.  A week has 168 hours so you're seeing multiple
spinups per hour.  Drives are rated to last a few hundred thousand, maybe a
million, spinups before they have a tendency to go south.

> My Seagate drives don't seem to report a Load_Cycle_Count attribute, so
> I can't compare.

I think attribute 4 (Start_Stop_Count) might be comparable.  One of my
Seagates has a count of 40, the other has 642 - both of which sound like
spinup counters based on my usage of the system.  (Comparison:  the one
GreenPower drive I didn't toss into the parts bin has a Load_Cycle_Count of
7460 and a Start_Stop_count of 136 - seems the two vendors use these
parameters a bit differently.  I got rid of the spindown timer so I now keep
the "Green"-Power spinning 24/7.)  The Seagates on my system are running the
root/syslog volume so they basically never get a chance to spin down.

-rich