Why Western Digitals New 750GB green drive is really brown.

I just bought one of the new 750GB WD drives with the new "Green" technology. Basically that means that the drive spins down within a few seconds of access. That's all OK - but the problem I have is that under UBUNTU - I am getting a SATA fault indicating a frozen interface when it spins up.

these are appearing in my syslog

[ 3541.483329] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 3541.483422] ata4.00: cmd b0/da:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
[ 3541.483425] res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[ 3542.182473] ata4: soft resetting port


I also notice that the hard drives load cycle count (there is an upper limit of something like 300k load cycles before the drive is rooted) is increase dramatically, for example after 10 mins in my server its at


193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 57

I'm running this kernel
2.6.20-15-server
Which I think was ubuntu feisty.


-- Further notes - The error was actually raised by smartctl when it failed to wake the sleepy drive.   Looked into it a bit further - the frozen SATa link appears to be caused by smarton tools not recognising that the drive has spun down. (http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-id.../msg11092.html) .



However the large increase in Load cycles is cause by the green power saving in the drive - and this cannot be disabled. Depending on the way the server uses the drive then this number can increase very quickly - and at a largish number (perhaps 300k) the drive will be considered end of life and it's health status will show failed.


-- So I think I can risk using the 750GB to replace the failed 500GB SATA and perhaps one of the older IDE drives - there's one in there with nearly 20k hours on it.