These WD Green drives are the new 4K Advanced format drives. Along with that, WD thought it would be a great feature to build a timer in their firmware to autopark the heads after 8 seconds so to reduce energy. For many that use these drives in a NAS, other external USB storage or even a desktop, this was not such a great idea. The continual autoparking of the heads greatly reduces the lifetime of these drives to the point where 3 months with the 8 second autopark timer is equivalent to ~3 years of use.

To remedy the situation, you can adjust the autopark timer from the default 8 sec up to a maximum of 300 seconds (5 minutes).
This needs to be done MS-DOS and the easiest way is as follows:


1. create  a bootable MS-DOS USB thumb drive. Make sure to choose FAT as the format.
http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm

2. Download the WDidle3.exe file from Western Digital's website and save the wdidle3.exe file to the thumb drive
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113

3. Shutdown your PC, remove all other hard drives except the WD Green drive that you want to change the wdidle timer on.

4. Restart your PC and go into your PC's BIOS and make sure you turn AHCI off otherwise your flash drive will not be recognized. Also make sure that the thumb drive is set as the first bootable drive. Save your BIOS settings.

5. Restart your PC, it should hopefully see the thumb drive and boot from it into MS-DOS.

6. Once in MS-DOS, type "wdidle3.exe" without the quotes and press enter. The wdidle3.exe utility should run. From there, you can use the following commands:

wdidle3.exe /r
-this will provide you info on the drive including the current timeout. Factory default is 8 seconds.

wdidle3.exe /s300
-this will change the autopark timer to 300 seconds (5 minutes) which is the maximum allowed.

You can also do another wdidle3.exe /r after you make the change to see that the drive has accepted the new timer.

**DO NOT USE** the wdidle3.exe /d command. This turns the timer off however many people have reported that the drives eventually slow down to a crawl and/or generate errors using this command. The best is to change the timer to 300 seconds.

Once done, shut your PC off and repeat step-6 for each WD Green drive 4K drive.

Once you are finished, plug your hard drives back in, go back into your BIOS and turn AHCI on, change your boot order, etc. and reboot back into Windows.
Drink a beer.

edit: fixed some typos and removed the space in the 'wdidle3.exe /s300' command line. (thanks XX).


This message was modified by the poster at 03 11, 2011 08:45 AM

Topic URL: http://forums.ncix.com/forums/topic.php?id=2278208

A couple of notes:
- This also applies to earlier (now discontinued) EADS drives that predate the advanced 4K formatting. Users with those drives in NAS boxes will probably find their drives parking themselves to death as well.
- Don't have a spare USB stick lying around? A CD works too.

I spent hours trying to make a bootable CD-ROM with the wdidle3.exe file and it was a waste of time. The USB stick was way easier. I am never going to erase this MS-DOS bootable USB stick. Ever.

Isn't the timer in WD Black drives turned off though? Why would turning it off hurt it so much? If it doesn't hurt it so bad can we turn it off and if we experience issues just turn it back to 500 seconds? I plan to put all my greens in a MediaSonic 4 bay usb 3.0 enclosure to hold my HD movies/TV and run them through a HTPC and wouldn't really wanting the drives to turn off every 5 minutes when not in use :-/

Well the whole idea of autoparking I assume is to save on electricity costs.

You also might want to confirm with MediaSonic that these 4K sector drives are compatible with their NAS products. This WD Green drive was not compatible with Netgear's ReadyNAS lineup until very recently when they came out with new firmware for their NAS' that made them compatible with 4K sector drives.

The mediasonic is just a enclosure not a NAS device :)

Is it absolutely vital to only have 1 drive conntected at a time? Or rather, only the WG Greens? Is there no way to specify which SATA channel to use?

Just connect one drive at a time, boot PC, do the change, turn off the PC, connect next drive and repeat. Won't take longer than 5 minutes or so to update  a half dozen drives.

Thanks, Todd. I think that's a good thing to know! I'm looking at drives for storage but it's the WD Greens that are conveniently available. I wish that NCIX supplied the Samsung drives but alas, they don't.
I think the power consumption might go up a bit after 'changing' the drive from whatever the default is, just under 3 watts? I might go up to 4 and a bit but that's negligible. If I get a WD Green drive, I think I'd not want to take a chance leaving it at the default 8 seconds and would run the utility.
Does anyone know if the heads park or you get high load cycle counts with other advanced format drives? Or is this a specific feature to WD?
Samsung F4 2TB drives have the advanced format but I haven't read of them having power saving features like WD so either they use a different type, don't use it or no one is talking about it yet.

P.S. do you have the 3-platter version (w/ # MVWB0)?

This message was modified by the poster at 12 09, 2010 12:33 PM

I am not sure which version I have but will check when I get home.

Awesome. Thanks. Worked on my pair of drives.

I found that my drive's factory default was 4 seconds (!!) before it would park the head.

I fixed this with the wdidle3.exe /d command and haven't had any issues at all. I suspect your warning may only apply under certain conditions.

My drive is running under XP and performance hasn't changed one bit (pardon the pun) :-)

OR just buy Samsung's HD204UI 2TB....OH WAIT A MINUTE....NCIX NEVER SELLS IT!!!

Hi there, thanks for this new information. I have 4 of these in my 2nd Gen Drobo? Should I be concerned and run this utility? I don't run my Drobo 24/7, but when I do it can be on for a few hours at a time. Thanks for any opinions.

My drive is in a USB enclosure, is it still possible to run wdidle3.exe to change the park time?

OK that is what I expected but I had a very thin hope that I would not have to do that. Thanks for the info.

I didn't even know there was a reason to change the timer on a Black as I thought only the Greens autoparked. Are you sure this was necessary?

Do you need to initialize the HDD before being able to follow these instructions?

No, initialization is only for drive detection in a Windows-based OS.

Outside of an OS, be it Linux / Windows / Apple / other, initialization is completely unnecessary for detection of the drive by the bios. In fact, Windows is the only OS i know of that uses initialization, although there could have been others in the past or even present that may have done so (did OS2/Warp use it??)

The short answer is NO though.

This message was modified by the poster at 12 29, 2010 02:38 PM

Will this affect data on the drive already? I just stumbled across this post and I have one green drive already installed from last year and the load cycle count is 9500+...
I'm going to be opening the case and doing this tweak to the new 2TB green I just got, should I do it to the older drive as well?

I guess I'm asking if this will in any way compromise the data on the drive I've been using for a year?

This message was modified by the poster at 12 29, 2010 03:13 PM

Always back up your data before attempting ANY sort of firmware upgrade.

It is VERY possible that you could lose your data should the upgrade fail.

That makes sense, but I'm full up on data as it is. I guess I'll have to update  the firmware on the new 2TB, copy the data from the 1.5TB and then go and update  the firmware on the 1.5TB.
Fun.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Moving (cutting and pasting) data is much faster than copying. If you cut and paste the data from the 1.5 TB to the 2 TB it will be much quicker, though if you have an operating system installed on the 1.5 TB this is not an option. If that is the case, you will need a cloning program like Acronis or Norton Ghost to do the job for you.

Ahh thanks for the tip.

I'm wondering though if 9500 load cycles is all that horrible for a years worth of use. I can't find a 'max' number on 3.5" drives, but the google search I did said that the max load cycles for a 2.5" drive is something like 200-300k.

I may just let it be if the max numbers for a 3.5" are similar.