WD Green Standby

nielspauli · 7. Februar 2016

There have been written a lot about WD Green Caviar and Standby / spin-down. But I still have not been able to figure this out.

I have 3 WD Green drives:
WD15EADS - 1.5TB 32MB Cache - Firmware 01.00A01
WD10EACS - 1.0TB 16MB Cache - Firmware 01.01A01
WD10EAVS - 1.0TB 8MB Cache - Firmware 01.01A01

All drives spin down immediately with the hdparm -Y command.
All drives does not behave as expected using the hdparm -S command to set the spin down time. I found in this post, that hdparm -S 3 could work.

For the WD15EADS, hdparm -S 3 /dev/sdx, makes the drive spin down after 10 min. (The expected behavior would be 15 seconds)
For the WD10EAVS, hdparm -S 3 /dev/sdx, makes the drive spin down after about 15-20 min. (Haven't timed it accurately, but it works consistently)

However, the WD10EACS does not spin down at all. What can cause this? The WD10EACS only differs from the WD10EAVS by the amount of cache. It even has the same firmware revision.

All the drives are empty, and I'm certain I don't have anything accessing the drives which can keep them active.

BTW: For all drives the dreaded idle3 timer is disabled.
Apparently none of the drives support Advanced Power Management (hdparm -B /dev/sdx gives APM_level = not supported)

Wolf2000 · 7. Februar 2016

What is:
nano /etc/hdparm.conf

nielspauli · 7. Februar 2016

The content of hdparm.conf desn't really matter.

I change the settings via SSH using hdparm command after boot. I.e. after hdparm.conf is applied.

Wolf2000 · 7. Februar 2016

yes

quiet
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WDC_WD10_EARX-00N0YB0_00A123456789-0:0 {
apm = 0
spindown_time = 120
write_cache = on

nielspauli · 7. Februar 2016

Yes, what? Do those settings work for your EARX drive? What spin down time do you get? 120 should give 10 minutes.

Wolf2000 · 7. Februar 2016

Yes
Power Manager
You must the apm = 0 change

nielspauli · 8. Februar 2016

I know how to set the disc properties via the GUI. Using hdparm is just another way of doing it and makes it possible to set values and change things you can't from the GUI. Anyway, it does not explain why my two 1TB drives behaves differently with the same settings.

Did you try hdparm -B on you EARX drive? I don't think any of the Green drives support APM. Further, Have you tried any other time than 10 minutes? My WD15EADS spin down in 10 min. regardless of what time is set with hdparm -S or disc properties.

Eryan · 9. Februar 2016

I was experimenting similar issues to you. hdparm tends to be a little "sentimental" sometimes. You could perhaps look what is accessing your HDD and preventing it from sleeping as suggested on this post. Are you using samba or Plex Media Server? If that is the case, take a look at this post (that's how I finally managed to make the HDDs in my NAS sleep). You could also check the S.M.A.R.T configuration (if you are using it) and see if it is set to Standby (that way the disks won't be awaken to be checked).

nielspauli · 11. Februar 2016

Thank you for your suggestions, however, as I said: All the drives are empty, and I'm certain I don't have anything accessing the drives which can keep them active.

Anyway, it seems that the WD Green drives has a life of their own. Just recently, the problematic drive started to spin-down after 10 min. What caused this is unknown.

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