HDD Standby: APM Disable to prevent HDD early failure

[ceut]

Hello!
I have my great 202TE for about 1 week now, with a new Seagate "NAS" HDD (ST3000VN000).
I was hesitating a lot with Western RED Series.

So: here is the BIG problem: APM management is set to low, so this HDD (like WD Red series) goes to sleep from himself to fast and to much !!!
Here is a screenshot of that, you can see 111 power on hours, but near 5000 load cycle count (head parking) !!!
Moreover, there is the noise of head parking which irritating me
It's a shame for a HDD "NAS" branded product, I will call seagate an return this hdd to my store.


I know that the "hdparm" command in ssh can avoid that, with the "-B 255 /dev/sda" "-B 255 /dev/sdb..." option, so my new question is:
Could you include that setting for all HDDs inside the firmware, and save our HDD from early failure(and less noise) because of bad APM management from seagate/western or else?

Thanks

Note: it seems that synology have put something like that in their DSM firmware, but I have a Qnap so can't confirm.
http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic ... 24&t=41515


Edit: APM Value for Seagate NAS is "C0h", even if I set half an hour standby is the web inteface of 202TE
Western Digital have released a firmware update "wd5741.exe" for their Red series which sets APM to 300s: a lot better !
(and it can be disabled completely with wdidle3.exe !)

[ceut]

Hello,
Answer to myself:
After calling Seagate, I had a (good) guy who tells me that it is not possible to upgrade Seagate Nas firmware as there's no f/w actually.
So I have returned my Seagate 3To Nas, and I take a WD Red and I saw that APM was fixed to 300s (last update from WD).
With wdidle3 I have totally disabled this timer and I've only LCC=16 since 50h runing time.

I also take the idle3 binary from http://forum.thecus.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=7898, works well on my 202TE (it's about the same Intel platform)

I will update this thread later, but I think that WD Red are the good one .
Also, I saw that Western has new "Purple" product: maybe I will try it too for my 2nd HDD to build my raid1 system

[orion]

Thanks for sharing the details and the nice info! It's better to have LCC control in web UI!
+1

[ceut]

After 136hours of poweron HDD time, still have only 25 LCC . This number doesn't rise at all since I've disabled HDD Powerdown in the ADM web interface (in fact I've understood that LCC goes +1 when ADM asks to the HDD to go to sleep only so basically every half-an-hour of inactivity by default, EXCEPT if APM is enabled inside HDD Hardware: APM has very higher priority than ADM sleeping command).

I will re-active the sleep mode later, because now, I must buy my 2nd HDD to build my raid1 system (maybe testing the WD purple line)


BUG REPORT/I found a bug withg ADM 2.2 beta: Smart Attributes doens't refresh until system restart, I don't know why

[Auberon2k]

Wow, I didn't realize how drastic an issue this was. I have 5 WD REDs. 3 I purchased when I got my AS-608T and 2 more I added just after New Years. The original three all report idle timers disabled, the LCC count for the last 8-ish months is 146 and that's with the default 30 minute ADM spin down. The newer two drives show LCC around 140000. idle timer was 8.0s. I've used the tool to disable the idle timer now to match the original 3 drives. Hopefully that will rein things in a bit.

[ceut]

Yes...
That's why I'm fighting against this HDD manufacturer's method to reduce HDD life with this sort of invisible planned obsolescence (for example WD Red series are sold for 600.000 LCC cycle "at ambient condition" so I think it's less than that... http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/S ... 800002.pdf).
Moreover, there's noise with this...

As you said, old WD Red Series have not this stupid thing, only the new ones, but actually we can disable it with WD tools (until when..?) .

And with Seagate NAS Series: disable APM is impossible so I do not recommand Seagate NAS HDD for this reason.

I think this subject is very important, that's why I've created this topic.