If your NAS distro knows enough to kill the idle timer, then I expect it will also know how to partition the drives.

You can check it afterwards with fdisk, or with "hdparm /dev/XXX1" (run hdparm with no flags on the first partition, it will print out the sector offset).

Cheers

Thanks again, Mark.

Digging up this old thread again... it's about 3TB drives now, but everything else should still apply.

Mark, have you heard anything about bad series of WD 3TB drives? More in particular the WD30EZRX series? On Newegg, 33% of all user reviews claim this to be a bad drive since a lot of them seem to be DOA or die within the first couple of days. I know you like Western Digital the best of all brands, and so do I. But this news is disturbing to me. Does it hold any truth to it? This seems an exceptionally bad track record for a Western Digital drive. (and I'm in the market for one because I want to built an unRAID server)

I have two WD Green 3TB drives, as of three weeks ago. They work, and I like the capacity. The previous 2TB drives were pretty close to dead silent, cool, and just wonderful units. The new 3TB drives, with the extra platter, vibrate more than the 2TB drives do, but thus far they're still very quiet and cool running. RECOMMENDED.

The thing with Newegg, is the drives get banged up in the delivery system, and with something as delicate as a 2TB/3TB drive, one gets what one should have expected after a bumpy ride through UPS!

Buy at a large local shop instead, and avoid delivery-DOAs that way.

Cheers

Note that the Newegg threads for the 2TB drives were equally negative when those drives first appeared too. Same problem: single-drive retail shipments are rarely packed well enough to protect the drive from UPS guys who throw parcels 20' to the doorstep.

Cheers

Oh, and same deal with the WD "Idle3" timer: the factory default is still 8-seconds on the new 3TB versions. I recommend using the WDIDLE3.EXE utility to change it to 30 seconds. Or if you just cannot boot MS-DOS to do that, then the latest version of my Linux hdparm program also now has a flag to change the timer setting.

Cheers

Cheers Mark, that reassures me somewhat. I guess the delivery services in Belgium aren't (yet?) as bad as in the US.


I remembered to do that. No problem whatsoever with the WDIDLE3.EXE utility. Now happily spinning around with a 30 seconds timer.

Cheers!