Hello “fzabkar”.
I guess it “was” misdirected because as you said, the info given was something really generic and didnt answer the question. Whats even more questionable was that I sent a text file highlighting the values that pertained to my question.
You must be a bit sensitive to my dilemmna because the example you stated is where my questions are. Here are the values that I sent:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POSR-- 200 200 051 - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time PO---- 182 182 021 - 7858
4 Start_Stop_Count -O–CK 100 100 000 - 18
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct PO–CK 200 200 140 - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate -OSR-- 200 200 051 - 0
9 Power_On_Hours -O–CK 044 044 000 - 41236
10 Spin_Retry_Count -O–C- 100 253 051 - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count -O–C- 100 253 051 - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count -O–CK 100 100 000 - 16
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O–CK 200 200 000 - 13
193 Load_Cycle_Count -O–CK 001 001 000 - 4456930
194 Temperature_Celsius -O—K 128 100 000 - 24
196 Reallocated_Event_Count -O–CK 200 200 000 - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector -O–C- 200 200 000 - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable ----C- 200 200 000 - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count -OSRCK 200 200 000 - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate —R-- 200 200 051 - 0
||||||_ K auto-keep
|||||__ C event count
||||___ R error rate
|||____ S speed/performance
||_____ O updated online
|______ P prefailure warning
As you can see, the load cycle count is crazy high. I did a little detective work and found that load cycle count is attributed to the number of times the hd head parks itself to save power. On a green drive this time based feature can be as low as 8seconds. After a little more investigation I found that WD has a small program that can reset this time to something more realistic like 5 minutes. I did the calculations and figured out that if the drive had a original load cycle (count) time of 5 minutes that the drive would have a load cycle count of about 530K, still high according to WD’s numbers…but on another manufactures drive thats an acceptable number especially since the drive was running linux which does the park hd heads thing under the os’s commands in addition to the drives self maintenance.
When you add the two together do you get an hd with an artifically high load cycle count and the drive is ok, or is the load cycle thing a purely mechanical count and the drive has parked its heads 4.5 million times and still working!
That would also mean that wd’s own numbers are really, really low considering that they state that a load cycle count of around 300K is where you should start paying attention to the drives reliability. 4.5 million could mean that the drives reliability is about 15 times better then they (know about?) state, especially when the other important values are acceptable. Maybe time on is high, but the drive was used in a backup server that backup’d, read/wrote data once a day, as was told to me.
So we know that the person answering my question did’nt have the experience necessary to answer my question. I even asked if I could e-mail a tech that may better know how to answer the question.
As of now, the refurbished drive is a misnomer, I should have said a pulled drive from a working environment, but the geek in me wants to know what these number mean if a drive has done the park hd heads thing 4.5 million times but the threshold is 300K.
Concerning the power on hours, I was planning to use the drive as storage for videos to move stuff off my desktop, so wasnt largely concerned by those numbers - more (or much more) than 1/3 a year of 24/7 on time safely remains. But now the issue has changed and the drive is off my list because I know that there will be a day where I leave the now external drive connected, 120 days later…anyway.
But the puzzeling questions about the drive remains to be answered.
thanks.
