[geeks] the virtualization project

[Nate Raymond]

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 8:09 AM, <vintagecoder at aol.com> wrote:

> There have been discussions on WD drives and ZFS. Apparently it has
> something to do with WD failure modes on their desktop vs. enterprise
> drives. ZFS does not like anything getting in the way.
>

In recent years WD has intentionally crippled non-RAID Edition (RE) and
Black Edition drive firmware regarding TLER:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery#Western_Digital_Time_Limit_Error_Recovery_Utility_-_WDTLER.EXE

Also on a lot of WD consumer drives they set extremely short idle timeouts
for head parking (especially the 'green' drives), which results in
potentially massive numbers of head parks/unparks during use (i.e. you'll
find the SMART value Load_Cycle_Count to be excessively high).  For some
drives this can be relaxed with the WDIDLE utility (something I try to do
with all WD drives I use).

BTW, in this discussion I was surprised nobody brought up Debian.  I've had
good luck with it in production for some time now.

- Nate