right, have overseen the model (ops. the title also 
)
and parking heads for a desktop drive seems useless....
just speculating: could it be a bad interaction between disk and buffer? As buffers are getting bigger, far less R/W operations have to be done in sequence, allowing more idle time for the heads. That could explain also why some users are reporting head parking during file access (i.e. video playing), with associated lag.
portomomo wrote:right, have overseen the model (ops. the title also
and parking heads for a desktop drive seems useless....
just speculating: could it be a bad interaction between disk and buffer? As buffers are getting bigger, far less R/W operations have to be done in sequence, allowing more idle time for the heads. That could explain also why some users are reporting head parking during file access (i.e. video playing), with associated lag.
Well, the "Green" series of HDD from various makers all seem to park a lot, apparently to save power.
Interestingly enough, Western Digital's AV series has what's called 'PWL' or 'Preemptive Wear Leveling' - their words:
"The drive arm frequently sweeps across the disk to reduce uneven wear on the drive surface common to audio video streaming applications."
Again - unless you're running an ancient drive I see no reason for this - as far as I know drive heads do not touch the platters anymore, so how can it cause any wear? There must be some reason for them having the feature, though.
Have you tried the firmware update on your drives yet?
Din't applied the FW update yet. During the weekend I'll dismantlle the NAS and make the update.
But I've got curious about the issue of load/unload cycles and are making some investigations:
There's a lot of discussiona about it all over the net, mostly manufaturers parising the benefits and users afraid
of loosing their beloved data due to excessive wear of the disk:
A documento from Hitachi explaining a little more about the feature:
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/9076
A reaction from WD after user complaints (BTW a lot more responsible attitude, providing a lot of background infos)
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/53
My first thoughts: the feature is both
1.
a marketing argument (so called "eco", "green", "low power". HDDs) with questionable results:
+ the power effectively saved corresponds to a few Watts a day
- the theorical life of the disk gets reduced due to wear of the mechanism
= more disk consumption (= more resourced used, more electronic waste produced etc..,)
2.
an effective way of reducing damage by accident (high G accelerations during R/W operations) like impacts, power loss
More interesting for portable devices as laptops
3.
??? (but I will find it out 
)
I would suggest: if our "chirp" is really gone with this new FW we should move this discussion to another thread.
