WD Green 'Load Cycle Count' Common Failure

[Nate Silvers]

Just heard about this common failure and checked my drives. Apparently the max threshold is 300,000 - 1,000,000.

Mine are going up every second why do some have low Load Cycle Counts but more hours. The 1tb has way less cycle counts than the 2tb and it's about two years older.

1.5tb
Power on hours 9431
'Load Cycle Count' 119816

1tb
Power on hours 14477
'Load Cycle Count' 4398

2tb
Power on hours 6672
'Load Cycle Count' 33705

500gb
Power on hours 16345
'Load Cycle Count' 4544

Found this useful post written by an 11 year old. http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/285453-whats-the-optimal-time-in-seconds-for-hard-drives-to-park-heads/page__p__1896472#entry1896472

Shouldn't have to do that but changed the park time from 8 seconds to 5 minutes. Shouldn't have to worry about it now.

 

[Nate Silvers]

Hi Nate,

I'd be interested in any links to actual failures that this has caused - I've got a stack of the WD green drives (22 at last count ) and have been following this topic for a while.

The high LCC count has been an issue that seems to have been blown out of all proportion, and lots of people have worried about it without there being any evidence of it causing a significant reliability problem. WD has said that the drives are rated as good for 1000000 LCCs - the original design spec was 300000 but that didn't mean the drive will fail when it reaches that figure or 1000000 for that matter.

On your 1.5tb drive something is accessing it more often than the other drives, on average every 283 seconds. By setting the idle3 to 5 minutes it will mean that the the drive will not unload the heads and do it's power saving thing and other parts of the drive will probably then wear out faster instead. If it has taken 2 years for your 1.5TB LCC count to reach circa 113K then it would take about 17 years to reach 1000000 - personally I'd be expecting any drive to wear out or fail by that point.

The wdidle3 tool is not described as being for use on the green drives, and although it obviously works there is question over what it does to your warranty. IIRC there is a post by a WDC rep on their forums saying it was ok to use on thegreen drives, but that's all I found.

So in your case, I'd have left well alone .

Didn't see any articles or comments blaming this for a failing drive. All I saw was the 300,000 statement and the fact WD rep said it can cause wear and tear and these drives aren't designed for desktops.

That 1.5TB LCC count might be because my music is on that drive but it was on the 500GB drive for two years prior and that LLC count is very low. Since the LCC is so high on this drive I think five minutes is best as it's getting used a lot as I'm always playing music. As the WD rep said these drives are made to store and not be accessed.

I would rather set it to five minutes just to be on the safe side. The 2TB has movies stored on it but is also my download drive. The 1TB is for my games which gets used the least, maybe I should set this back to 8 seconds.. Maybe I should set different times for different drives is that possible?

 

[Nate Silvers]

Good move.

 

[Nate Silvers]

mine are all going strong!