Critical design flaw in some Western Digital Caviar Green drives

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-crit...reen-hdds.html

It has come to our attention that Western Digital's Caviar Green HDDs suffer from a critical design flaw caused by an aggressive power-saving feature. Western Digital has developed a new technology called Intellipark (aka Idle 3 mode) and it is designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the HDD's heads in a park position and turning off unnecessary electronics after 8 seconds of inactivity.

According to an in-house investigation and user reports', some software and operating systems are incompatible with the Intellipark feature causing endless head parking movement as the HDD continuously goes in/out of idle mode. This abnormal behavior creates stress on the HDD and that could lead to the following issues:

• Loud clunking/clicking/buzzing noises every few seconds.
• Artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles in S.M.A.R.T.
• Possibly shortens life-time of the HDD.
• Possibly reduces performance of the HDD.
]

Hmmmm....think the 2 drives in my mirror'ed NAS are WD10EADS. Will check when I get home.

[Eric55]

I had a six month old 1tb fail on me four weeks ago, contacted WD for a RMA number. I sent it back and had the replacement within three days.

didn't exactly help the data though did it lol

[Welshchris]

The Only really bad experiences ive had on hard drives had been Hitachi they are awful.

[DocDutch]

chris the hitashi deskstar harddrives have always been known as deathstar. Regarding wd i've had 2 drives die on my within 2 years

[Welshchris]

Zing u already posted this elsewhere.

Doc my mate who runs a computer shop uses Western Digital a lot and has very few failures.

At the end of the day whatever brand of hard disk u r gonna use there will be a certain ammount of failures it happens.

[DocDutch]

Chris I know that as well and I still buy WD drives so it was a 1 off really as all my other computers in the house are still running fine on their drives.

The laptop I had with a deathstar yeah that didnt last long.

Originally Posted by Welshchris

Zing u already posted this elsewhere.

Doc my mate who runs a computer shop uses Western Digital a lot and has very few failures.

At the end of the day whatever brand of hard disk u r gonna use there will be a certain ammount of failures it happens.

Yeah I posted it on your thread for your mate. I also made its own thread for those who were not gonna read your thread. Its not like I started 2 threads with it

[Welshchris]

the last Hitachi drives i bought were years ago from Maplin. They were 160GB IDE and had 3 of them within 6 weeks as they just kepy dying and in the end they exchanged for a Seagate. What i found funny was when i was talking to the so called technician there he had just said to me "Its funny because you are the only one who had brought any of these back", with that one of his collegues came through the door with another one in his hand and said "We have had another one of these bloody drives back again". I said well "really so im the only one am i?" and he didnt know where to look lol. I did laster find out that apparently around that time Maplin were apparently selling off remanufactured drives as totally new drives.