From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Fri Dec 1 14:14:08 2017 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7AA14E57029 for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2017 14:14:08 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Received: from bede.home.qeng-ho.org (bede.qeng-ho.org [217.155.128.241]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org", Issuer "fileserver.home.qeng-ho.org" (not verified)) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 132973C18 for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2017 14:14:06 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Received: from arthur.home.qeng-ho.org (arthur.home.qeng-ho.org [172.23.1.2]) by bede.home.qeng-ho.org (8.15.2/8.15.2) with ESMTP id vB1EDw75065873; Fri, 1 Dec 2017 14:13:58 GMT (envelope-from freebsd@qeng-ho.org) Subject: Re: Mount NTFS from "Live" system? To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <53922.1512076255@segfault.tristatelogic.com> From: Arthur Chance Message-ID: <4438334a-4946-4b88-a487-ced42b7c676a@qeng-ho.org> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2017 14:13:58 +0000 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <53922.1512076255@segfault.tristatelogic.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-GB Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.25 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2017 14:14:08 -0000 On 30/11/2017 21:10, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > > In message <78bf2bd4-63e0-afce-1b24-ebdadba055b5@qeng-ho.org>, > Arthur Chance wrote: > >>> I have -never- had any WD "black" drive fail on me, but I don't believe >>> that I'll be buying any more of the "blue" ones. (The fact that this one >>> failed is rather inexplicable, because even though it was 3 years old, >>> it had less than 1,000 power-on hours on it, and less than 200 power-ups.) >> >> As a matter of curiosity, did you note the Start_Stop_Count value and >> was it far higher than the power cycle count? > > Well, fortunately, I did not actually dismantle the drive or beat it with > a hammer, as I usually do before I put a "bad" drive in my e-waste pile. > So I was able to check, just now and get a precise answer to your question: > > Start/stop count (raw): 709 > Power Cycle count (raw): 235 Hmm, that's not it. After finding this https://superuser.com/questions/840851/how-much-load-cycle-count-can-my-hard-drive-hypotethically-sustain I think it was probably the Load_Cycle_Count. Whichever it was, I'd see the relevant raw figure increasing at a ridiculous rate. >> I've had WD Blue drives fail on me as well. I think it's because the >> 2.5" Blue drives are aimed at laptops and their firmware has (or had) >> the same aggressive power saving/head parking behaviour as the Green >> drives, which interacts badly with Unix style regular syncs. I got round >> that by installing smartmontools and using >> >> -e standby,off >> >> in smartd.conf to prevent the disk idling. It may seem paradoxical that >> making the disk work more stops it failing... > > Wow! These are all revelations to me! Thank you! I knew that the WD green > drives were designed to idle themselves, and apparently my shiny new 4TB > WD "My Passport" external USB 3.0 drive was set at the factory to do that > also... an annoyance which I believe that I have now successfully disabled > on that drive. > > What I never knew till today was that any of the "blue" drives would self-idle. > > Does that only happen on the 2.5" "laptop" ones? I think it was only the 2.5" ones. Aggressive power save makes sense for a laptop but not a desktop. > Anyway, yea, I can see how this could possibly cause problems in the case of > *nix systems. (And it is annoying to me generally when my various tech toys > start thinking that they are smarter than I am, and making decisions for me, > especially those that I would not have made myself.) > > I'm gonna try to see if I can disable this "feature" on this specific drive > and then see If I can maybe get it to complete the self test... which it did > not do the last time I tried. > > But one would think/hope that even if the drive was set to auto-idle, it would > at least have enough brains/courtesy not to fall asleep in the middle of a > built-in firmware self-test. But maybe not. And maybe this drive is not > actually broke after all. > > I'll be checking on that. > >> These days I mainly use SSDs so spin up/down isn't a problem. > > Quite so. > > However if your SSDs ever -do- start to spin, then you've got a real > problem on your hands. :-) An astronomer friend insists all SSDs rotate at ~0.0007 rpm. :-) -- An amusing coincidence: log2(58) = 5.858 (to 0.0003% accuracy).