Hello every one. I would like to know some things about the management of the hard drive in MBL. Assuming that it has a WD Caviar Green (WD20EARS) I would like to know if I have/can to do anything to keep my drive ‘happier’. Since this is a network drive, I really want to know whether
a) It is affected by fragmentation. If yes, can I defragment?
b) If it is affected by the high LLC in Green HDD models. If yes, can I do something? I read some posts that problem exists and I worry (a bit for now, more in the near future)
c) Anything else I should do considering this is a network drive?
Any help woth this guys? Any?
I would also like to add a question. The HDD out of the box was showing 3GB used. Can I use an app like WinSCP to have access to these files that cannot be seen otherwise? I saw several topics mentioning access to the above files.
I really need some feedback here.
You might want to look at the wikipedia page on ext3, which is the filesystem used on the MBL. Fragmentation on modern Unix filesystems aren’t a big deal, which is why there is no tool to defragment ext3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Defragmentation
As for the high LLC issue, there’s an interesting article here
http://www.sagaforce.com/~sound/wdantiparkd/
I shelled into my MBL, and issued the smartctl command in the article and discovered that the LLC is 181579 and the Power Cycle Count is 22 on my drive. It has been running for more than a year and is connected to about half a dozen computers via SMB and NFS, so I’m guessing that’s what’s causing the high LLC. I’m not too concerned.
If you consider this an issue, the article offers some solutions.
M.
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Thanks for your reply. So, I assume I can access the filesystem in MBL using something like WinSCP? I am interested to know whether I can backup files on the linux side. And are these files stored on the actual HDD included in the box (hence 3GB showing as used when I switched MBL on?).
Frankly, I am not familiar with the LLC issue. I just read that people are too concerned about it. I saw a post here that some things can be done through SSH and by copying content to the linux side, but the warranty is gone. Opening the box to take HDD out so I can use wdidle3.exe also voids warranty.
In short, you need to enable SSH from the Web Interface. There’s a hidden URL for that.
http://mybooklive/UI/ssh
Once that’s going, then yes, you can use WinSCP to get to the Linux partition. The account is “root” and the default password is “welc0me”.
Not sure why one would bother. If something goes wrong with the drive, then RMA it. Poking around in the Linux side can be fun, but it can also brick your drive. There’s no “bare-metal” recovery available for the drive. You can’t just hit the reset button and hope that the drive will reset to “out of the factory”.
In fact, the reset button doesn’t do very much at all.
http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Can-t-connect-to-MyBook-Live/m-p/325689/highlight/true#M7605
Thanks for your answer. I was more worrying about the future ie, after warranty expires. For example, if the hdd dies after, if I can replace it myself. However, I don’t know where Debian is installed. I suppose in an existing HDD partition? If this is the case, I was wondering more about how to get it up and working in a new HDD.
