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 WHY those WD drives auto-park? Don't most OSes have an "energy" feature where you configure when drives should shut down and the computer sleep after a period of inactivity?
2) Is auto-park, auto-sleep and auto-spindown the same thing?
I already have a WD drive (WD5000AAKB) placed in an external enclosure where I've experienced that the drive likes to spin down after a while of not accessing it. This is very frustrating whenever I suddenly need to save a file etc. as the computer partly hangs because the drive doesn't respond.
The solution is to turn off the drive (on/off power button on the enclosure), then on again to spin it up.
3) I've heard about "WDidle 3" (in case people are still having problems finding it, it's can be downloaded from
here or
here), but also read that some people are unable to turn off those problematic features on their drives while others again are having success. So what's the deal?
4) I've read that these drives are unsuitable for RAID configurations because of something called TLER. I'm not entirely sure what TLER is, but having read earlier in the thread that people are having issues with it I thought I'd mention
this page which explains how to disable it in order to make the drives RAID compatible.
Now I'm planning to use the drives as stand-alone drives, but I might look into mirroring, which is one kind of RAID of course.
Would I need to disable TLER for that?
Furthermore, most (all?) of these configuration tools are for DOS. I'm on a Mac (Mac OSX), so I'd have to bring the drive over to a PC-owning friend for reconfiguring, but I'm also confused about exactly what to enter and how to start the utility (I read that some people are having issues with that as well).
Basically, I just want a silent SATA drive which works! And there doesn't seem to be that many options around.