Sure...
If you
search this area of the forum and in particular the
Western Digital Load Cycle Count Discussion area you'll see problems associated with various models.
In general when I expanded the search and looked at the NetGear or QNAP forums, there are also complaints about performance and more importantly
reliability from Green drives.
Having tried a "cheap" Seagate and then returning it because of vibration and a general lack of trust, I eventually arrived at the conclusion that if you want hassle-free RAID with no issues around performance and relability, not only on the physical drive but also things like the "Time Limited Error Recovery" which stops drives de-syncing from the array when there's an error, you need to consider spending more
That said, I'm up to a month of use with my current config and haven't had any problems, yet (touch wood).
BUT the thing is,
a month isn't very long. There are people who have been running the WD Greens much longer and haven't had problems, and then there are people who have.
I tried a Samsung HW203WI for a friend the other day, ran it for 4 days. Again a drop in the bucket time wise but enough to notice that the Load Cycle Count WAS NOT climbing much.
Again, how you use the drives may mean otherwise. Whereas I have machines on all the time and they are using the NAS, so going to sleep doesn't happen that often.
I don't power cycle much either.
Right now I'm running 2x WD Blacks (2TB), 2x WD Green (1.5) 15EADS series and 1x WD Green (2.0) 20EARS.
Mainly because I had the green disks prior to the NAS and bought the blacks as a middle ground to buying Enterprise disks (RE4, NOT GP (Green Power) Enterprise).
The Blacks run much hotter 40-42c vs 35-38 on the Greens. Performance is better though as they are a solid 7200 NOT a random 5400-7200.
I've also used WDIDLE3 to DISABLE/MAX OUT the firmwares Load/Unload timer and I wrote zeroes to the disks before using them, ensuring completely blank disks so that the partition layout is correct for cylinder boundaries and performance.
In summary, I figure the following:
- by distributing the type of disks I have I'm lessening failure by model happening at the same time
- My disks are various ages (apart from the Blacks) so I'll hopefully avoid death by batch
- As a disk "plays" up, I'll replace it with something better, ie, assuming problems with the Greens.
- I also
backup the important stuff on the array, meaning in a complete failure, I'm not weeping like a small child
Hope that helps.
