linux-kernel - Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux

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Date:	Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:11:15 +0200 (CEST)
From:	Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...putergmbh.de>
To:	Christian Pernegger <pernegger@...il.com>
cc:	"Tvrtko A. Ursulin" <tvrtko@...ulin.net>,
	linux-ide@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux

On Thursday 2008-04-10 17:01, Christian Pernegger wrote:
>
>>  Those fancy new WD GreenPower drives seem to be heavily suffering from the
>>  rapidly increasing head load/unload problem. [...] I got one of them
>>  (WD5000AACS) recently and to my horror [...]
>
>>  [...] With it the unload feature can be either disabled or timer set from
>>  100ms to 25.5 seconds. But obviously I can't try it...
>
>Why? Using a DOS boot disk once would not be that bad as a workaround,
>would it?

This DOS nonsense does not work anywhere outside x86.
I see people put *lots* of afterthought in their utilities, hardware even.

WD is not the first to do this unload nonsense, I've noticed it with 
Toshiba before: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/11/15/413 Since then, I am 
dependent on the thkd[1] module and no hdparm is going to fix it; the 
module does a dumb read every now and then on one device, causing 
streaming performance to kink periodically, but it works at least at 
keeping the disk alive. (Reason it's in kernel: better to have even when 
userspace is not running.) Improvements welcome.

[1] ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-jengelh/rawkernel/
somewhere in there since recently.
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