XigmaNAS

So, I have my NAS up and running solidly for about a week now, and it's great for it's purpose. I still need to add more of my HDDs I have, which brings me here...

I have read quite a bit about WD Green HDDs and high LCC counts when used in a NAS environment.

Which leads to another conundrum.

WD says that they do not warranty Green drives used in a NAS (previously my drives were used in my PC for storage and served the media centres so I am moving them to the NAS). I bought the Greens because it seemed like the use in a large storage environment is what they were designed for...

Anyway, so I looked into using wdidle with my drives but again WD says they do not warranty the drives I have if wdidle is used (they are not on the list of approved drives).

So has anyone that has used wdidle with green drives had any issues getting warranty replacements?

I have 2 HDDs currently in my NAS, both were new when put in this NAS.

The 2 drives are:
WD Green 3.0 TB that was a warranty replacement.
WD Red 4.0 TB that was bought new from a local retailer.

I started with the Green drive because I had it and wanted to test a theory I had that another drive I was using for testing was failing, which was the case. I then added the Red drive about a week later. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. screen in the NAS webgui today, and noticed the Green drive has LCC of 364, and the Red only has 49. Now the green drive definitely has more power up and down cycles of the NAS, for testing and set-up (reboots getting familiar with how to set-up and use the NAS, etc.), but even so, that wouldn't be almost 10 times more LCCs. I didn't check the LCC of the Green drive when I first installed it, so I don't know for sure that the count started at 0, but knowing that the Green drives park after 8 seconds then I can see this being at least somewhat accurate.

I plan to use a pair of my WD Green 2 TB HDDs in a RAID1 set-up and keep reading that allowing HDDs to park often can be a problem in RAID arrays.

So my question is getting down to should I use wdidle to change the park timer of my Green HDDs?

I could monitor the LCCs of the drives over the next few days, and see if the counts get higher on the Green drive than they do on the Red without a good reason to do so (such as accessing more files from one drive over the other), to see if it's an idle timer adding counts or not.

I have 4 more WD Greens to add to the NAS currently.

I plan to buy Red drives from now on, but have to use what I have for now.

Any other points or insight would be good.

Heavy LCC can kill the drives.
Wdidle works well on the greens and should be used.
On WD green EZRX drives some people recommend to run edidle with the /s300 command and not to use the /D option
Read this, then decide:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?th ... exe.18171/
I would and do prefer te REDs, but it is also a question of use and budget, of course

Thanks for the link.

Previous to reading that link I did look up what some of the parameters in S.M.A.R.T. mean and that's when I noticed the Start/Stop count, of which my drives have 5 and 10 counts, 10 for the Green and 5 for the Red...

I think I'll use wdidle.

Now I have one last question related to that then:

I haven't found any definitive information on how this may or may not effect the data already on the disc. From what I under stand it is only modifying a value in the bios of the HDD, and shouldn't effect any data or access to that data, is this correct?

I haven't found any definitive information on how this may or may not effect the data already on the disc. From what I under stand it is only modifying a value in the bios of the HDD, and shouldn't effect any data or access to that data, is this correct?

It usually does not harm the data, but your are playing with the firmware of the drives, so if anything strange happens during the wdidle process (e.g. power loss) your disc may get bad.
But anyway you should have a backup of your data.

Yeah, currently the data on the drives I plan to modify have two copies at my disposal. I'll use wdidle before I format those drives.

Thanks