Is there a problem with head parks on WD Green HDDs?

peternm22 · **Posted:** Sat Jun 19, 2010 8:09 am

silence_seeker wrote:

Also, do you remember what you entered in WDidle in order to disable Intellipark? Seems a lot of people have gotten no response from the drive or setting it has gotten no effect.
But from your posting it sounds like you've confirmed that disabling Intelliseek actually works.

It took me a few tries to get WDIdle to actually run. It's a new PC, and I was having trouble getting it to boot off a CD or USB drive. Booting off the USB drive WDIdle would just "hang" and I couldn't get a report or anything from WDIdle. I tried a bootable CD instead, but it wouldn't even boot from it (the system just went straight to Windows). I eventually had to (temporarily) switch the SATA mode to IDE in the BIOS instead of AHCI.

This allowed me to boot off of a CD. I ran "WDIdle /R" to see what the current value was, and it was set to 8 seconds. I then ran "WDidle /D", and it said it was successful in changing the time to 62 minutes (which although isn't disabled, should pretty much eliminate the problem).

If I get a chance, I'll see if I can check the production date. Would it clearly state "Production Date" on the drive? Or will it be coded into some other number?

rpsgc · **Posted:** Sun Jun 20, 2010 2:16 am

Under WD Life Guard Diagnostics, my WD20EARS (new revision 00J2GB0) has a "Load/Unload Count" value of 188. (is that good?)

The drive has been installed for roughly one month.

silence_seeker · **Joined:** Sat Oct 22, 2005 12:12 pm **Posts:** 51

peternm22 wrote:

It took me a few tries to get WDIdle to actually run.
.... (snip)
I eventually had to (temporarily) switch the SATA mode to IDE in the BIOS instead of AHCI.

Sounds like a hassle. Fortunately you only have to do this once, right?
What does switching between SATA and IDE modes do? Excuse my ignorance, but I'm a Mac user. I was hoping to be able to make a boot CD to use with an Intel Mac, but there's no BIOS in Macs, so I might have ask someone with a PC to help me out (I'm hoping I can just connect the external enclosure to the PC via USB instead of physically putting the new drive inside the PC, and that switching to IDE mode doesn't mess up my friend's computer or even erase its hard drives or something.

By the way, isn't using WDIDLE 3 just a matter of opening up the DOS window in Windows and running it from there?

Quote:

If I get a chance, I'll see if I can check the production date. Would it clearly state "Production Date" on the drive? Or will it be coded into some other number?

I don't know. I was just hoping there would be a production date or some other indication on it somewhere.

peternm22 · **Posted:** Tue Jun 22, 2010 12:50 pm

From what I understand, you HAVE to run WDIdle from a bootable CD (or USB drive). You can't run it within Windows. Running WDIdle is a one time thing, unless you want to change the setting again. You can do 3 things with WDIdle:

1) Get the current intellipark park.
2) Set the intellipark time (I think the range is up to 300 seconds, or 5 minutes)
3) Disable intellipark (which seems to just set the time to 62 minutes, which should eliminate any issue)

I don't have any idea how Mac's work in relation to boot CD's, so I can't provide much help to you in that regard.

Switching the IDE mode was simply to allow me to be able to boot off a CD. I don't why I needed to do it, but it was the only way it would work.

silence_seeker · **Joined:** Sat Oct 22, 2005 12:12 pm **Posts:** 51

Thanks for clearing things up.
I'll probably be best off asking someone with a PC to run WDIDLE 3 than on the Mac.

Will it work equally well when the drive is connected via USB in an external enclosure or connected directly to the PC's controller inside the PC itself?
The former would be a lot easier of course

peternm22 · **Posted:** Tue Jun 22, 2010 4:11 pm

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you can't connect the drive using USB to run WDIdle. Again, I'm not 100% sure but I think it needs to be connected to a SATA port (maybe an eSATA port would work).

graysky · **Posted:** Tue Jun 22, 2010 4:48 pm

I just ordered a 2TB EARS drive and will be running it on a Linux box. I currently have a Seagate drive on the machine but I don't see a load_cycle_count for it:

Code:

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   105   099   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       9437702
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   095   095   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       796
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       1
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   075   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       29852882
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       3415
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       800
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0000   021   021   000    Old_age   Offline      -       79
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   084   000    Old_age   Always       -       199222
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   090   090   000    Old_age   Always       -       10
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   072   065   045    Old_age   Always       -       28 (Lifetime Min/M
ax 22/30)
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   028   040   000    Old_age   Always       -       28 (0 15 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   027   025   000    Old_age   Always       -       9437702
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   190   000    Old_age   Always       -       87
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       210878599271801
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1188585039
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       558737547

Perhaps it's a WD-specific parameter? Anyway, I am also concerned about this issue. Guess we'll see when I get it and install it. Just curious what other Linux users have to say. I have read through this 10-page thread and have seen some mixed posts about this under Linux. Some say they have huge numbers, others report small numbers (Ubuntu I believe).

More feedback from Linux users would be nice

Also, if anyone has some links to the proper method to align this drive for partitioning on a 4k cluster, please post them. I have read numerous articles about this and very few of them are consistent with each other.

tima · **Joined:** Mon Oct 11, 2004 7:18 am **Posts:** 74

I've got 3 1 GB WD green drives. My WD10EACS has been in service as the Recorded TV drive for WMC (Vista and now Windows 7) since Nov 2007, and I have two WD10EADS drives bought two weeks apart in Aug 2009, one for the OS and data and the other just for data. These are all in my Antec P182 case and are always less than 35C temp. My computer's on about 16 hours/day running Windows 7. One of the EADS drives has the head parking firmware. Guess which one of these three drives just started developing bad sectors? If you said the head parking one with a load/unload count > 185,000, you'd be right.

Snowdog · **Posted:** Sun Jul 11, 2010 3:19 pm

Late to the party, but I just had a drive failure on my 2TB GP which is a pure media drive and is much newer than than 1TB GP which is my system drive.

Still running: 1TB
Hours: 10698
Load Cycle: 5049

Failed (ate partition table, several disk errors) 2TB
Hours: 1573
Load Cycle: 4475

Clearly the cycle rate is much higher on the media, but the total number is lower because it hasn't been in service long. So it doesn't seem like enough cycles to fail.

But the more I read, the more it looks like failure rates are much higher on the 2TB drives.

joetekubi · **Posted:** Mon Jul 19, 2010 5:06 am

I must be the last person in the world to have noticed and worried about the WD green drives Load_Cycle count head parking issue, and not fixed it.

I tried for weeks to fix the puppy with combinations of hdparm command lines and other tweaks. Also made sure to backup all my important files, due to several reports of data loss.

Finally got a freedos usb flash drive fixed up with wdidle3.exe in the root directory. Booted my computer on that, ran "wdidle3 /S" to report the values (it was 8 seconds!), and disabled it with "wdidle3 /D".
Smartctl now reports no increase in Load_Cycle over 24 hours.

Success is possible, even for a guy like me.
I really, really, hate messing with drives that have a lot of data on them.

Oh, and the drives are MUCH quieter now. No thumps from the constant "park - unpark" cycle.

-joe

tutu · **Posted:** Wed Aug 04, 2010 3:50 am

What about WD20EARS-00MVWB0? 3 platter 2TB? I want to use them in my own built NAS. Does disabling LLC stop it going into standby at all?

joetekubi · **Posted:** Wed Aug 04, 2010 4:06 am

tutu wrote:

What about WD20EARS-00MVWB0? 3 platter 2TB? I want to use them in my own built NAS. Does disabling LLC stop it going into standby at all?

Don't have any experience with the 2 TB EARS, but I assume all the new WD green drives have the same issue.

BTW, it's a bit confusing. WS green drives have several parameters that affect noise and performance. For me, the most critical was head parking AKA Load_Cycle. Other parameters that are relevant are standby and acoustic management.
HTH

tutu · **Posted:** Wed Aug 04, 2010 5:23 am

joetekubi wrote:

WS green drives have several parameters that affect noise and performance. For me, the most critical was head parking AKA Load_Cycle. Other parameters that are relevant are standby and acoustic management.
HTH

I take it then I can disable LLC - stick it in my NAS and the drives will be able to go into standby as normal? Thinking of 24/7 power consumption (when they are not in use - most of the day!)

joetekubi · **Posted:** Wed Aug 04, 2010 5:35 am

Yeah, just use the WD "wdidle3.exe" utility to turn off head parking.
You might want to monitor the drives closely for a day or so and make sure that they go into standby as you wish.

extremen · **Joined:** Sun Oct 31, 2010 2:51 am **Posts:** 16

Hi, i found this topic because i wanted buy larger Scorpio 2,5' 640 or 750 GB . I own for now 500GB Scorpio 5000 BEVT- in my laptop. In reviews of this Scorpio hdd's i found this issue.
Fast i checked my 5000BEVT Smart and going little mad. For compare i own 3200BEKT used in my silent machine. And for other compare i found smart from my old damaged Toshiba Pata drive 60 GB with over 175 000 load cycles count and BB.
Let see on the picture attached. 500GB scorpio is in caution now. ( i must check for BB scan)

I solved problem "tick tack" drive with utility diskinfo.
http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html
I turned off APM in advanced options. From 2 h to now are load cycle count data constant.
Drive is little bit noisy, but isn't nothing dramatic. I know are other utilities like quietHDD atc.
One must i say, this is a instant solution. After reboot your system you must do the same procedure, but for me is little better than boot in dos.

We know that "parking heads" does not mean damage your hard drive. But why listen the uncomfortable noise parking heads, why risk soon damage your drives when we can solve this.
|One sentence i have to tell you WD. Save 0.5 watts with parking heads isn't our priority. |

Vicotnik · **Posted:** Fri Nov 05, 2010 11:53 am

Seems to me that parking the heads would reduce the risk of damaged sectors on a laptop drive. Might be one reason why many manufacturers implement this feature on 2.5" HDDs, not just WD.

extremen · **Joined:** Sun Oct 31, 2010 2:51 am **Posts:** 16

Is there any solutions hdparm works after hibernation mode in Win XP 32b?

zvunks · **Joined:** Tue Jan 11, 2011 10:16 pm **Posts:** 1

zsero wrote:

If you would like to use wdidle, that's the best version/writeup I found on the net:
http://www.synology.com/support/faq_sho ... u&q_id=407

I registered myself here to say
Thank you!
for this discussion....

It worked for me on a WD5000BEVT HDD...
Idle timer was set by default on 8 seconds.
After running wdidle /d it disabled completely.
So after runing again wdidle /r ... it displays "Idle timer is disabled"... or something like that.
Now the LLC is increased only when the hard goes into power save or when i shut down the NAS.
I'm thinking if i would better let the timer set somewhere 20 minutes or so... For now it's GREAT!

Now i have to try to fix the WD20EARS drive... after i move the data from it.

Thanks again!

quietdragon · **Posted:** Sat Dec 31, 2011 3:03 pm

Please consider making this a sticky.

I rediscovered this thread after stumbling across http://www.waldner.priv.at/ramblings/ and contemplating a heads up post to this forum.

Ralf Hutter · **Posted:** Mon Jan 02, 2012 1:13 pm

quietdragon wrote:

Please consider making this a sticky.

I rediscovered this thread after stumbling across http://www.waldner.priv.at/ramblings/ and contemplating a heads up post to this forum.

I assume you're referring to this post:

http://www.waldner.priv.at/ramblings/#wd%20disks

which I've quoted here for posterity:

Quote:

Western Digital (WDC) "Caviar Green" disks and Idle Timeout ("IntelliPark")
"Modern" WD disks are quite aggressive with regard to trying and save power - so aggressive, in fact, that they'll go and park the read-/write-heads after just 8 seconds.
This often means trouble, as some filesystems per default flush their buffers every 10 or 30 seconds, and certain applications, such as mplayer under some circumstances, read data every 10 seconds, thus nearly instantly re-waking the drive.
And those drives are only spec'd for 300-1,000k load/unload cycles for their heads.

In my setup, this lead to ~600 load/unload cycles per day, which would've meant I'd reach the 300k in ~500 days -> 1.5 years. And with my luck with disk drives, it would've instantly fallen over dead right then.

Affected models, according to WD: WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS

You can check with smartctl (from package smartmontools):

smartctl -a /dev/sdX | egrep "(Power_On_Hours|Load_Cycle_Count)"

and knowing how much cycles/hour resp. /day you get is just a bit of easy math away.

WD claims that you can disable this timeout via hdparm -B, but on my box this just throws an error, and has no noticable effect otherwise.
But if you click further on that page, you'll get to a tool called "RE2GP Idle Mode Update Utility" or "wdidle3". Of course, this tool is for DOS - DOS, for fucks sake! - which means you'll get to fiddle around with FreeDOS.
I'll give you the short route for how I finally, after many a detour and senseless reboots, got the WD tool to run:

grab an empty USB stick of a couple MB
make a DOS partition (type 04 or 06), don't forget the "bootable" flag (don't make the partition too big, I recommend max. 500 MB)
mkdosfs it
mount it somewhere
aptitude install libqt4-dev
apt-get -b source unetbootin (maybe with a /unstable tacked on)
dpkg -i unetbootin_*_i386.deb
run unetbootin (it wants the root-pw, because it doesn't use sudo)
select "FreeDOS" and the stick, let it install
grab the "wdidle3...zip" from the WD site I linked to above, unzip it
copy BOTH the .exe and the .txt to your still mounted stick
unmount the stick, boot from it
Important:
you can find WDIDLE3.EXE on C:
run it with /R (for report) first
you really, really want to select "no drivers" in the FreeDOS boot menu - HIMEM/EMM386 make the WD tool not work
run C:WDIDLE3.EXE /S90 (or 300, or 12.1 or whatever fits your needs, see WDIDLE3.TXT for reference)
curse WD lots

As an aside: hddtemp allegedly wakes up drives - smartctl -a | grep Temp allegedly doesn't. And smartd (which comes with package smartmontools wakes 'em up, too, so fiddle with the config file (/etc/smartd.conf) so as to not throw away the above effort.

I certainly can't vouch for the validity of this post, but here it is, added to this thread, FWIW.

krick · **Joined:** Fri Apr 28, 2006 5:59 am **Posts:** 47

I don't know if this has been posted in the thread yet, but this site...

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critica ... -hdds.html

...has a bootable CD image ISO with WDIDLE3 that you can download and burn to a CD.

The page above recommends running wdidle3 /S300 to set the parking time to 300 seconds (5 minutes) instead of the default 8 seconds.

In the TiVo forum, they recommend completely disabling intellipark using wdidle3 /D due to an issue with hanging the TiVo during a soft reboot...
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/sh ... p?t=370784

The TiVo faq linked above also has a link to another bootable ISO CD image with WDIDLE3.

jimmyzaas · **Posted:** Sun Feb 26, 2012 12:56 pm

I was unable to disable head parking with the WD30EZRS WD Green 3TB using WDIDLE3 1.0.5.

Basically, using the wdidle3 /d switch and then running wdidle3 /r shows that the feature is disabled, but it had 0 effect. The LLC count went from 0 - 77 in 8 hours when the hard drive was not yet formatted and just plugged into the motherboard. It seems like everytime the Motherboard SMART feature polls the drive, the head would move and then park itself after a short time.

I then ran wdidle3 /s300 and it seemed like the LLC count went up slower but was still going up while the drive was idle.

So this is a major bummer, these new green drives suck! I hope they update that stupid tool soon. In the meantime, I'm running HWMonitor 24/7 so that SMART polling keeps the drive alive.

Just for a comparison, my Hitachi 2TB 5K3000 has been on 4205 hours, it has only parked the head 42 times.

faugusztin · **Posted:** Sun Feb 26, 2012 2:00 pm

Suck because a number increases ? Did anyone had a failure connected to the high LLC count yet ? Or this whole thing is just a problem for you because it behaves differently than before ?

krick · **Joined:** Fri Apr 28, 2006 5:59 am **Posts:** 47

jimmyzaas wrote:

I was unable to disable head parking with the WD30EZRS WD Green 3TB using WDIDLE3 1.0.5.

Basically, using the wdidle3 /d switch and then running wdidle3 /r shows that the feature is disabled, but it had 0 effect. The LLC count went from 0 - 77 in 8 hours when the hard drive was not yet formatted and just plugged into the motherboard. It seems like everytime the Motherboard SMART feature polls the drive, the head would move and then park itself after a short time.

I believe that there are several versions of WDIDLE3... 1.0, 1.0.3, 1.0.5. You might want to locate and try another version. Also, I found that on my drive, I had to run "wdidle3 /d" immediately after booting. If I ran "wdidle3 /r" first, then running any other wdidle3 commands would hang and do nothing.

Are you running SpeedFan? They've established that SpeedFan keeps waking the drive up every few seconds, causing it to park/unpark an excessive amount of times.

akos · **Joined:** Mon May 07, 2012 1:29 pm **Posts:** 1

Amazingly enough, I have just discovered that my WD Green WD5000BEVT 2,5" 500GB system drive parked it's heads over 2 million times..

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | egrep '(Cycle|Power|Model)'
Model Family: Western Digital Scorpio Blue Serial ATA family
Device Model: WDC WD5000BEVT-00ZAT0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 064 064 000 Old_age Always - 26454
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 121
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 95
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2160468

No issues at all so far. Are there any statistics anywhere, that show correlation in number of parks vs drive failures? I don't think it makes sense to disable the parking any more..

xan_user · **Posted:** Tue May 15, 2012 6:25 am

i never worried about the cycle count, it was the parking noise that was the problem for me.

MikeC · **Posted:** Tue May 15, 2012 9:35 am

This was posted somewhere in this long thread a while ago, it might have been me.

There are no-head-park versions of the WD Green, if this is an issue that bugs you. WD calls them AV drives, as do other brands which offer such drives. They are designed specifically for 24x7 operation, originally for video surveillance and industrial/commercial apps such as kiosks & signage. Now they are also said to be good for video streaming apps. This type of drive is also available in 2.5" format.

Having said that, I generally use WD Green drives only for data storage, not the OS, having migrated all my PCs to SSDs (of 40~160GB capacity) for the OS. Even Windows does not scan a secondary data drive (where, for example, all your libraries are tortured) as much as the OS drive, thus lowering the number of head park cycles. But I have to say it does not bother me -- neither the noise or the awareness of the head cycle count. On the machine I'm on right now, the WD Green has run 2104 hours & had 43,919 load/unload cycles. Its health is 100%.

Is there a problem with head parks on WD Green HDDs?

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