That's good news if they can sell those fans separately. In the meantime I came across a temperature sensing fan speed control circuit at eBay . Would two of those (one for each fan) do the trick of regulating the fan speeds (and keeping the noise level down)? My only concern is how the hard drive e...

Hmmmm.... :? The hard drive enclosure ( Proavio S4UF 4x removable bay rack ) comes with 2x 40mm cooling fans which are connected to a "temperature monitoring" board. The circuitry on that board disappointingly does not control the fans but detects that they're both connected, and via two temperature...

An external hard drive enclosure of mine came with two (relatively noisy in my opinion) 40mm fans which blast at full speed all the time. I find this unnecessary and would like to have their speeds adjust automatically according to the temperature inside the enclosure. I've seen 120mm fans with buil...

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 easie...

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...

peternm22: yes, indeed very different to what has been said there. The problem it seems is to get a proper answer from WD themselves. I just looked at their specs/info page for Caviar Green, and there is absolutely no mention of Intelliseek anywhere. Seems to me they added that feature just to save ...

A utility called WDTLER should enable TLER on those WD drives, or so several websites say. However, I've read that since late 2009, all WD green drives have had their firmware disable user-changes to both Intellipark (the drive automatically parks its heads every 8 seconds after inactivity causing m...

Which Seagate drives are you going for, joetekubi?
Didn't Seagate have some firmware issues with certain models?

How about noise levels? The only reason I considered the WD green drives is because of favourable reviews regarding low noise characteristics. I'm considering otherwise now.

Well, it's finally confirmed... It's not possible to disable "intelli-park" on WD Caviar Green drives -read here . For crying out loud! WD doesn't even tell consumers about this little "feature" which causes read/write delays (each time the drive unparks) and I assume a premature death because of un...

SMART (daemon) running or not should not be a problem for any drive. You're correct, the Intellipark feature is the problem, and solutions and help exists for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I didn't know there were already working solutions. I know about WDidle 3 which is a DOS utility, but there are dis...

Hmmmm... I hadn't thought of the fact that with SMART software running that alone would contribute to a higher load. Then again I assume (because of discussions like this one and elsewhere) that the load count is still very much higher for these particular drives than many other drives. On the Mac p...

Are you saying that most of the problems with these WD Caviar green (WDxxEARS) drives are due to Windows/Linux and/or PC motherboard incompatibilities? After reading several discussions on the subject it may seem that part of the problem is due to the fact that energy saver or SMART software may be ...

I'm not familiar with Macs but surly you could boot into DOS using a USB-stick, boot CD or similar? You can run Linux on a Mac after all. I found an application called DOSbox which I just tried out. It worked and allowed me to run WDidle, but it didn't recognize any of my drives. Perhaps not so str...

Pierre wrote:I got a WD 1.5 EARS drive as a replacement to another drive...
Very quiet indeed, but the load/unload is quite high really...

Will you be running WDidle 3 to rectify the problem? If you do, please tell us how it went.

Lobuni : since these are different things, do you know if auto-spindown can also be disabled on WD drives (actually on hard drives in general)? Apart from WD wanting to kill their own drives as quickly as possible (just outside the warranty period of course) I can't understand what's useful about t...

If you have TLER, the handling of situation is left to RAID controller, thus it can choose different solutions, not just drop the drive from array, it can inform the user etc etc. I see. But that's hardware configurations where a circuit board is specifically built for RAID setup you're referring t...

Trying to decide on a couple of quiet drives to mount inside a disk array enclosure and been alerted about the auto-park issues which I don't completely understand (I'm not that deep into the tech-talk) I'm even more confused after having read this thread (and others). 1) Can someone please tell me ...

No, I never have to unplug the drive's Firewire/USB connectors. If I haven't already turned off the drive enclosure's power switch after unmounting it I can either switch it off, then on again to remount it, or I can use software such as Apple's "Disk utility" to remount it without touching the powe...

The only part that usually doesn't work is automatic spinning down of HDD when detached from system. Usually when you eject it from system, system just tells it's safe to remove (or power off) the device. It doesn't shut down by itself with default drivers. I don't quite understand what the problem...

Yes, I'm aware of that, but this is besides the point.
I just want to find out which IDE/ATA drive is worth getting and which one(s) to avoid in the 500 GB or so range.

I'll be using the external drive with a Mac using the Firewire 800 port. Here's the enclosure I'll be using (and have an additional one with a Samsung 400GB drive in, connected the same way). In case you're not familiar with Macs, the way an external hard drive works is that to connect it you just p...

I need an IDE drive because I have an external Firewire 800/USB 2 cabinet which only takes IDE (ATA) drives. It'll be used as a backup drive. I've been looking into dampening the Samsung drive (which is placed inside an identical cabinet), but there's little room for that sort of modification, which...

Good advice to let the drive run a while before putting important data on it. So Western Digital isn't a brand to stay away from then? I have heard that some brands are definitely "no-no!" (Maxtor and Hitachi), but I've been under the assumption that Seagate, Western Digital (Quantum? -have they sto...

What's the most reliable and low-noise level 3.5" ATA (not SATA!) hard drive these days? I was thinking about getting a Western Digital 5000AAKB (500 GB). My understanding is that this is the same drive as the SATA interfaced 5000AAKS and 5000KS which has been awarded as the " big low-noise champ "....

I'm considering placing two hard drives in a 19" rack enclosure: http://img-europe.electrocomponents.com/largeimages/R224256-01.jpg I believe a "1U" height type will do (the bottom one in the photo), and apart from the two drives I would also mount a Firewire interface and the power supply. Any good...

Has anyone mounted hard drives in a 19" rack enclosure before? Having a laptop and other 19" rack mounted equipment I've been wondering if that would be a good option (I've got vibration problems with my current external enclosure and a Samsung 400GB IDE drive). I was thinking that I could buy an em...

Edirol wrote:WD5000AAKS idle is annoying louder than a Samsung P120 250GB. There's some kinda high frequency whine.

Can others confirm this as well?
I plan on buying a WD5000AAKB (the IDE version of the WD5000AAKS), but I can't live with anything that makes a "whine".

While recent reviews are more critical towards AAKS, at least they report lower vibration than KS. And that's a good thing: it may woosh or whine, but it wouldn't vibrate the enclosure. Finding "the right" right drive doesn't seem to be an easy task at all, and very time consuming. I certainly don'...

"But what are you referring to when you write "AAKS" and "KS"?" There's no reviews of AAKB and there most likely will never be. Assume AAKS to be identical except that it has SATA/300 interface instead of IDE/ATA. KS is older variant of the same capacity and has 1 extra platter, thus higher vibrati...

before changing drives, try this - take your enclosure off the stand and put it down horizontally on some foam or a gel-pack. it just might do the trick. I'm not using the stand at all. I borrowed the photo from the manufacturer's website (as with the image below). My drive is placed flat down on t...