WD Red - How often should it park it's head?

[xreyuk]

I have 4 Seagate drives in my current HP N54L running debian with software RAID 5, 2 newer and 2 old drives. 

 

I had a drive failure on one of the old drives recently, and replaced it with a WD Red yesterday, as I've heard that WD Red's are designed for NAS use. 

 

However, my WD Red seems to be going through a load cycle count, about once every 2 hours. The Seagate drive's go through a load cycle count about once every 5.5 days. 

 

I don't remember changing any settings in hdparm or Smartctl, so are these head parking numbers normal for the WD Red?

[eddie563]

i read that there was an issue with these drives right after i bought them   ive not got my system up and running yet but i had this link book marked to update the drive firmware.

 

http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=201&lang=en looks at the park settings and further below you can find firmware updater.

 

as i said, i have not attempted it yet, my project keeps being delayed.

[xreyuk]

Thanks. I am already running that firmware version it seems, this is a new drive. I know that firmware update was to stop parking the head every 8 seconds like the WD Green's.

 

I don't think that once every 2 hours is bad, but I'm just surprised that a specifically designed 'NAS Drive' is parking it's head more than a regular desktop drive.

[oj88]

Just an opinion... I wouldn't worry much about it. I've got six WD Red drives (mixed 3TB and 4TB, old and new). The older drives are already 1,500+ days (4.2 years) old, running 24x7. Though I haven't looked at the load/unload cycles on these drives, I'd bet they're probably in their millions by now. Yet, they keep on chuggi'n.