I recently bought my first 2TB Caviar Black drive (WD2001FASS-00U0B0). In doing initial testing with the drive, I noticed that takes a lot longer to become ready than the 1TB FALS drives I’m familiar with… After using the drive for several days and starting and stopping it a few times, I noticed the raw SMART Spin_Up_Time value reported by smartctl was quite high and the normalized value was significantly below 100:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH RAW_VALUE 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 045 042 021 14758
I believe this drive has one more platter than the 1TB FALS and perhaps might take a little longer to spin-up, but I am concerned that the normalized value is so low. On all of my 1TB drives the normalized value is >230.
I called WDC customer support but was unable to elicit information related to my query, although the rep suggested that WDC does not recommend the Black drives for use with Linux. (I’m sure he was conflating Linux with RAID, but it is still funny/sad that companies are still seemingly willing to play the Linux-FUD card for hardware that clearly doesn’t care about the OS.)
So, I have two questions for folks here who have experience with these 2TB FASS drives:
Could you post your normalized and raw SMART values for spinup time on your drive? Do you think the 45 / 14758 values are cause for alarm?
Another difference I noticed with my 2TB is that on spinup it does not make a noticable “spin buzz” noise, but rather starts perfectly silent and can be heard very gradually coming up to speed. This seems odd. My understanding is that a very specific electrical sequence is required for the initial start of motors such as those found in HDDs, and it tends to produce this well-known and distinctive sound. Do others who have run these drives in external enclosures/docks also fail to hear the buzz at the very beginning of startup?
I’m pretty sure I’m going to exchange this drive with the local retailer, but don’t want to return an otherwise perfectly okay drive if it turns out this is just normal behavior for the FASS drives.
the normal thing is we hear the drive start spining
Well, I exchanged the drive locally. The second drive was the same; no spin-buzz noise. After a few start/stops the raw spinup time stablized around 13166, 77 normalized. Was the above comment speaking from direct experience with the FASS drives?
Doesn’t really matter, however, as the second drive failed my read/write qualification process with read errors and a subsequent failed extended self-test. Got multiple errors on first read pass after the first full surface write cycle. First drive was manufactured in March 2010, second drive July 2010, so it doesn’t appear to be a “bad batch” issue. I’m returning for refund at this point. I’ll be sticking with the FALS for a while longer, I guess…
Second drive smartctl output:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD2001FASS-00W2B0
Firmware Version: 01.00101
