Unfortunately, they appear to not have been built for this particular application. They auto park and the timer is set too low for Linux filesystems. (I believe the default may be 8 seconds! http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=78891)
My drives began to give me trouble (thankfully) even before the warranty ran out. I found the load cycle count on my drive to be extremely high - 10's or 100's of thousands. This is way beyond the expected count.
Here's how to query for it:
# smartctl -A /dev/sdX | grep ^193
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - XXXXXXX
Luckily there is a solution -- run this tool to either turn off the feature, or set the timeout much higher:
http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/
Make sure you follow the instructions closely -- you must power cycle the drives!
Now every time I boot, I run this script as part of the boot, just in case I forget if I put a new WD Green in.
#!/bin/sh
for dev in /dev/sd[a-z]
do
for dev in /dev/sd[a-z]
do
if ! hdparm -i $dev | grep Model=.*SSD
then
if hdparm -i $dev | grep -q Model=WDC
then
echo Disabling western digital 8sec park
/opt/idle3-tools/sbin/idle3ctl -d $dev
fi
echo Setting timeout for non SSD drive
hdparm -S 251 $dev
fi
done
then
if hdparm -i $dev | grep -q Model=WDC
then
echo Disabling western digital 8sec park
/opt/idle3-tools/sbin/idle3ctl -d $dev
fi
echo Setting timeout for non SSD drive
hdparm -S 251 $dev
fi
done
(WD has been mostly sending me back WD Red Drives, which is great as I believe they are marketed for NAS.)