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

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

As per SPCR recommendation and nice-sounding specs I and multiple of my friends have bought Western Digital Green Power drives in past half a year. Because the drive is particularly suited for media server applications, this is where the drives have seen their use.

But, alas, within past month news began to hit in that the feature in WD GP drives that helps to save energy, Intelli-Park, is not that intelligent. In fact, with default settings it parks the heads after 8 seconds of inactivity. What this means depends of your OS and usage pattern, but in these low-usage media server machines running Linux it means the drive will reach it's designed lifetime total or parkings in 200-300 days.

What makes things worse is that WD has been completely silent about the issue, and the tool that can disable the Intelli-Park feature is not publicly available. Ie. WD is doing their best to just let the drives die instead of warning the customers about the issue.

What to do? If you are using Green Power drive, check the SMART data to see if your drive has alarmingly high Load_Cycle_Count value. For my WD10EACS drive the count is 87k after two months of usage - almost one third of the designed lifespan spent. If you drive has a high value, contact WD and ask for the wdidle3.exe. It's a DOS program that can disable the Intelli-Park or configure it.

It might also be worth putting a mention about this to the SPCR review recommending GP drives so that people can prepare from the very beginning and thus prevent untimely death of their drive.

Title of this thread changed by mods on 4-30-09. Existing title was basically FUD

xan_user · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:13 am Post subject:

198 on 5000aacs in 3 months of ~12hrs/ a day. xp pro

So linux is harder on the GP than windows? Interesting.

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

xan_user · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:27 am Post subject:

I found this ftp server with the file

...

ftp://76.17.197.241/public/software/dos/ (warning unkown ftp server)

I guess with 198 parks value i should think about using it?

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

tehcrazybob · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject:

Can anyone confirm that this is only a problem under Linux? I've got a friend with four or five GP drives on Vista, and want to know whether I need to warn him about the problem.

porkchop · Joined: 25 May 2006 Posts: 340 Location: Australia

this is quite interesting. i remember reading some thread a while back, someone complaining about a constant clacking- i can only assume it was intellipark.

my 6400aacs has been running for about 2 months now(xp), i'm always running something that uses the hdd- but i'll definitely have a look at it with speedfan tonight.

edit:
mine- WDC WD6400AACS-00G8B0 with firmware 05.04C05.
power on hours count 1140
load cycle count 130

NyteOwl · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:45 pm Post subject:

Apparently it is a problem independant of OS. A thread at the forums over at Ars Technica indicated the wdidle.exe wasn't that effective.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/m/481009715931
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bgiddins · Joined: 14 Sep 2008 Posts: 175 Location: Australia

You can check this with

dukla2000 · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 3:11 am Post subject:

My GP has been running about 10 months 24/7. It is not root or swap so should have immune from this issue but

wojtek · Joined: 23 Sep 2007 Posts: 105 Location: London, UK

Windows XP user here. I just checked one of my GP's - I'm using this drive about 2-3h per day (external) since 3 months to play music.

WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (WD-WCASJ1834260)
Load/Unload Cycle Count 5176

During playing just 2 songs it's increased by 5 - from 5171
Another song - +3
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Strid · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 8:17 am Post subject:

My GP doesn't seem to suffer from said problem. It's been running for about three months now. I've been running Ubuntu 8.04 until I updated to Ubuntu 8.10 64-Bit this week. I wonder why spin-up times are roughly 7K after three months. Seems like 60 times a day is a bit more than would expect, although not extremely high. I don't think it goes into idle mode ever, because it seems to keep writing every 5 seconds. So it never reaches a long enough idle time to configure with hdparm. I can't really find the cause of this, though.

ronnylov · Joined: 17 Nov 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Borås Sweden

If you are running ubuntu, then this may help:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3675960&postcount=26

AuraAllan · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 8:31 am Post subject:

Here's SMART info for the WD10EADS in my Synology DS107+ NAS.

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Strid · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:53 am Post subject:

Does anyone know what Spin_Up_Time stands for? Seems like most if not all of us have a high number in this parameter.
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xan_user · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 12:50 pm Post subject:

update of email to WD asking for the wdidle3.exe file.

m0002a · Joined: 04 Feb 2004 Posts: 2133 Location: USA

CoccoBill · Joined: 11 Sep 2004 Posts: 14

Hm, running 4 WD10EACS drives on an Adaptec 5805 under Ubuntu 8.10 server for a couple months 24/7, no sign of problems here. Power_On_hours around 1750 and Load_Cycle_Counts between 8 and 12.

Nick Geraedts · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 12:49 pm Post subject:

I've got 8 WD drives connected to a 3ware controller. After a few months of running, I've got the following data from smartmontools:

protellect · Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 282 Location: Minnesota

Mine seems ok. XP64 bit.

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bgiddins · Joined: 14 Sep 2008 Posts: 175 Location: Australia

Derek Baker · Joined: 08 Nov 2004 Posts: 264 Location: UK

_MarcoM_ · Joined: 21 Jul 2005 Posts: 252 Location: Italy

Ok, now i have my new 640GB GP, date 29 oct 2008, firmware 05.04C05 (same as porkchop).

I will use it as a system boot disk under Windows Xp Pro SP3, what should I check? The load/unload cycle count?

KlaymenDK · Joined: 23 Aug 2008 Posts: 120 Location: Denmark

Derek Baker · Joined: 08 Nov 2004 Posts: 264 Location: UK

The Data for my GP's Spin Up Time is 8116, though the Current and Worst are both 177 and the Status is OK (all from HDTune).

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

Nick Geraedts · Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 4:04 pm Post subject:

zds · Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 251 Location: Helsinki, Finland

cmthomson · Joined: 09 Oct 2005 Posts: 1126 Location: Pleasanton, CA

There was a similar problem with IBM/Hitachi 2.5" drives about 6 years ago. The default firmware settings parked the heads after 20 seconds, and the OS of the particular appliance that my company built touched the disks every 30 seconds. After about a year of this, the soft-landing area started to shred and spew bits of gunk all over the platter, resulting in data errors.

All predictable after the fact, and really no one was to blame (right, try explaining that to our customers). The disks started to fail in alarming numbers, with park counts over a million.

The lesson here that engineers will appreciate (but not consumers or executives) is that full and open communication about a product's attributes and limitations benefits everyone.
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