DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

After getting a new NAS with WD Green drives, I discovered a problem with these drives that affect them in Linux systems.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Gre … td-p/15731

Basically the green settings in the firmware of the drive want to park the heads every 8 secs when the disk is idle.   The effect this can have on the disks is increase the Load Cycle Count of the disk very rapidly, about 20-40/hour.   These disks are rated at 300,000, but some say they can handle over 1 million.

I have one of these drives in my DNS-323, and after installing smartutils, I seem to be affected as I'm getting about 12 LCC/hour.  After 1.5 years of operations I get:

Power_On_Hours 12847
Load_Cycle_Count 162006

At this rate, I'll be over 300,000 at the 3 year mark which isn't that bad, but still.

My new drives got about 35/hour which is worse, but after changing the idle settings to 5 mins (from 8 sec), I don't get any increases which should protect the longevity of the drive.

I did this directly on my Synology NAS by compiling idle3-tools, as described here:
http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic … mp;t=37967

This built fine on my DNS-323 using fun_plug, but I get similar errors as others did with different makes of synology nases.

Running on my DNS-323:
root@martin:~/idle3-tools-0.9.1# ./idle3ctl -v -g105 /dev/sdb
Checking if Drive is a Western Digital Drive
outgoing cdb:  85 08 2e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 ec 00
data:  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
SG_IO: ATA_16 status=0x0, host_status=0x5, driver_status=0x0
SG_IO: bad response (not CHECK_CONDITION)
Trying legacy HDIO_DRIVE_CMD
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument

I'm wondering if has anything to do with the marvell controller, as when using smartctl on the DNS-323, I need to specify:  smartctl -H -d marvell /dev/sdb

Alternatively I can remove the disk, use WD's tool from DOS on a PC, but that is a pain and I'd rather do it directly on the device if possible.

Has anyone experimented with this?