WD Green 'Load Cycle Count' Common Failure

I had planned to get some WD GP drives for my Synology RAID 5 but with the various issues I'll probably go Samsung or perhaps Seagate once I've got some clarity to the issue.
 
Just sent my drive back to WD today . Another failed one :(

Hope they get it back to me fast so i can put it on the bay! not using there drives again.

Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD30EZRX)
 
Hulahoops said:
I had planned to get some WD GP drives for my Synology RAID 5 but with the various issues I'll probably go Samsung or perhaps Seagate once I've got some clarity to the issue.
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I've got 10 WD drives, 7 of them green and they are all working perfectly.

I set the wdidle3 timer to 300 seconds when I got them and not a single failure.

(I had a green fail on me two years ago, but it wasn't due to cycle count).

Avoiding the best green drive due to this problem is a little silly.
 
RimBlock said:
Tale of woe
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In the interests of editorial balance I thought I'd post my experience with the WD Green drives.

I started using WD green drives in 2007 and sort of settled on them as they just seemed to work (for me, at least). Before that it was a pretty random mix of manufacturers - Maxtor, IBM (Deathstars anyone?), Seagate, Samsung, etc.

The current set is 10 x 1TBs (EACS and EADS), 10 x 2TB (EADS and EARS) and 1 x 3TB (EZRX). Most have run 24x7 in a WHSv1 box (non-RAID) for a couple of years until swapped out for larger ones and then used for backups.

In that time I've had (I think) 1 DOA plus 2 that developed problems (no data loss) and were RMA'd. One of those was a marginal case where it wasn't a clear-cut fault but WD offered to replace the drive anyway.

So isn't it strange that different people can have such different experiences with the same range of drives?
 
I still think 8 second park is an utterly stupid move on their part, unnecessary mechanical wear and noise.
 
I have an older 1TB model. WD10EADS I believe. I was never aware of this issue until I noticed this thread a moment ago.

Power on hours: 18334 (So just over 2 years)
Load cycle count: 2256

Looks fine to me, and I have never edited the timer with the utility.
 
Concorde Rules said:
I've got 10 WD drives, 7 of them green and they are all working perfectly.

I set the wdidle3 timer to 300 seconds when I got them and not a single failure.

(I had a green fail on me two years ago, but it wasn't due to cycle count).

Avoiding the best green drive due to this problem is a little silly.
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To me it isn't a signle issue, nor is it silly to look for the least problematic HD at set price. This is at the same time as I look for some clarity from Synology as well. WD info on TLER - http://www.wdc.com/en/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

I say this with the full knowledge that the bulk of people are unlikely to ever encounter a HD error. Personally the monster hard drive I started with many moons a go was a 120mb hard drive and since then I've never had a mechanical hard drive fail on me *touch wood*, only two SSDs have failed.

The reality is WD does have a very good track record compared to most but I feel slightly put off by the continuing high price of consumer HDs and am certainly unwilling to pay nearly 3 times the price for the same sized enterprise drive, thus I'm making sure I've got everything covered before I finally have to replace my current array.
 
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Concorde Rules said:
I've got 10 WD drives, 7 of them green and they are all working perfectly.

I set the wdidle3 timer to 300 seconds when I got them and not a single failure.

(I had a green fail on me two years ago, but it wasn't due to cycle count).

Avoiding the best green drive due to this problem is a little silly.
Click to expand...

Why are they coming out the factory with an 8 second timer? Why don't they set them to 300 by default?
 
PiKe said:
Why are they coming out the factory with an 8 second timer? Why don't they set them to 300 by default?
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Powersaving? No idea really.



Hulahoops said:
To me it isn't a signle issue, nor is it silly to look for the least problematic HD at set price. This is at the same time as I look for some clarity from Synology as well. WD info on TLER - http://www.wdc.com/en/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

I say this with the full knowledge that the bulk of people are unlikely to ever encounter a HD error. Personally the monster hard drive I started with many moons a go was a 120mb hard drive and since then I've never had a mechanical hard drive fail on me *touch wood*, only two SSDs have failed.

The reality is WD does have a very good track record compared to most but I feel slightly put off by the continuing high price of consumer HDs and am certainly unwilling to pay nearly 3 times the price for the same sized enterprise drive, thus I'm making sure I've got everything covered before I finally have to replace my current array.
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I personally haven't bothered with enterprise drives because I could actually double my storage/redundancy for the same price, the latter being better. Two drives are better than one!
 
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Concorde Rules said:
Wasn't an issue in the first place, but to my knowledge, no.

I now have 10 greens ranging from 6 months to 4 years old and all performing fine.
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I remember looking into this years ago, when threads were first being posted. In fact, I see I even posted in one of the links above.

To my knowledge it was really just a concern about the EARS power saving not being particularly well suited to certain environments (certain servers and/or RAID systems?). The 'flaw' (IIRC) was just that you might reach the specified limit for one disk parameter quicker than normal, but there was absolutely no confirmation that this actually caused any failures.

I've been running 3 or 4 WD 2TB EARS drives for many years now, all with heavy use. Can't say I've had any issues at all.

The problem with all the 'critical design flaw' threads, is that anyone who has any failure at all, jumps all over it and then other people think the two are linked. But disks fail for a variety of reasons, and I've not yet seen anything which links the 'critical flaw' with any actual early life failures.
 
div0 said:
I remember looking into this years ago, when threads were first being posted. In fact, I see I even posted in one of the links above.

To my knowledge it was really just a concern about the EARS power saving not being particularly well suited to certain environments (certain servers and/or RAID systems?). The 'flaw' (IIRC) was just that you might reach the specified limit for one disk parameter quicker than normal, but there was absolutely no confirmation that this actually caused any failures.

I've been running 3 or 4 WD 2TB EARS drives for many years now, all with heavy use. Can't say I've had any issues at all.

The problem with all the 'critical design flaw' threads, is that anyone who has any failure at all, jumps all over it and then other people think the two are linked. But disks fail for a variety of reasons, and I've not yet seen anything which links the 'critical flaw' with any actual early life failures.
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The Gen 1 EARS drives were pretty dodgy in my personal experience as explained in post #20.

All 5 failed with bad sectors. The one RMA I kept also failed with bad sectors and both of the two 2TB drives I had at the time also failed with bad sectors after that post. I didn't even bother RMAing the 2TB drives in the end as I had no coffidence the drives I would get back would be safe with my data. Was the failure due to the load cycle count... possibly not but it is one hell of a coincidence that so many failed on me in a fairly short period of time.

I don't now use greens but then I don't use any LP drives from any manufacturer.

I am just upgrading my 2TB barracudas for 2TB Hitachi Ultrastars. The Ultrastars are 50% more expensive but have a 5 year warranty and a 2mil Hour 24x7 MTBF. The barracudas have a duty cycle of 2400 hours / year (average of 7 hours a day) and have no MTBF listed with a warranty of two years. My 5 Barracudas seem to be suffering in a RaidZ array. None have failed but they are certainly having issues.

RB
 
Whether or not you guys know.

The EARS drives had to be set up for advanced formatting by changing a jumper on the hdd, otherwise they would eventually go all funny!
 
Mine seem to be ok, I'll post again if they die. :P

WD15EADS 1500GB
Power On Time: 31390 hours
Start/Stop Count: 259
Load Cycle Count: 1,506,619

WD20EARS 2000GB
Power On Time: 19436 hours
Start/Stop Count: 109
Load Cycle Count: 1,292,975
 
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