Has anyone tried disabling head parking on WD's 2TB Green drives (EADS)

AndyD2k

Senior member
Feb 3, 2003
824
0
71
My drives keep failing in my WHS but I don't want to spend several $100 to replace the drives I have now. I read about disabling the head parking and I'm hoping that will help.

Has anyone tried this? And if so, did you have to backup your data before making the change in the firmware?
 

zerogear

Diamond Member
Jun 4, 2000
5,611
9
81
Failing in terms of what? I have a few of them in my WHS, and I never had issues like that
 

MagnusTheBrewer

IN MEMORIAM
Jun 19, 2004
24,135
1,594
126
Why would you want to disable head parking if you could? There's a much greater chance of damage to platters and the heads if they're unparked and powered down.
 

taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
6
76
Head parking is excellent... the issue I think he is referring to is that green drives supposedly park after 8 seconds of inactivity and AFAIK also shut down their motor... this has been referred to as head parking issue by most (although personally I think the motor shutting down is a bigger concern), it happens regardless of what you set your OS's power saving to (in all other drives you can set it in the OS, and it typically defaults to 20 minutes of inactivity)

the "keep failing in WHS" is an issue concerns me... that rapid sleep feature of caviar green drives should not cause them to appear as failed drives. but according to google results I found it appears that WHS is an even bigger piece of fecal matter than I though. Apparently it does.
WHS will consider the drives to have failed over this slight delay in spinup... because WHS is a POS and nobody should be using it. seriously, you shouldn't. It has dataloss issues. Go and get FreeNAS from http://freenas.org/ and use it in ZFS mode

I personally use green drives in an opensolaris ZFS raidz2 (raid6 equivalent)... every time i access data there is a few second delay since the motor is always off and heads always parked. I have no issue with it though. ZFS will never decide your drive failed due to spinup delay, or data recovery delay (TLER)... because ZFS is not a POS

you can supposedly alter the behavior of the drives with a tool called WDIDLE3.exe
google for it if you must; but I seriously suggest you move from WHS to a proper OS.
 
Last edited:

Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
freeagents do this too. the o/s gets pissed off because the drive takes its power management into its own hands. and usually ends up in corruption of the ntfs filesystem.

the amount of power to keep a drive idle is very very little
 

pcunite

Senior member
Nov 15, 2007
336
1
76
I've done it, and it works. You need to have 2GB of ram or less and boot into DOS and use WD's wdidle3 utility. Also if using Intel sata ports make sure you update the driver to the latest from 12-15-2010. I also had to update my BIOS as well. Make sure you format the drives using Windows 7 or know what you're doing otherwise.
 

Old Hippie

Diamond Member
Oct 8, 2005
6,361
1
0
Also if using Intel sata ports make sure you update the driver to the latest from 12-15-2010
Maybe that's the ticket between these drives working or not?

I have an AMD board and haven't had a problem with these drives.
 

AndyD2k

Senior member
Feb 3, 2003
824
0
71
I made the change back then and my drives are still running

I also got rid of my mediasmart server and built my own. The server could have been the reason why my drives were failing too. I went through several drives during that period and lost a bit of data. 0 issues since then
 

Mfusick

Senior member
Dec 20, 2010
500
0
0
I made the change back then and my drives are still running

I also got rid of my mediasmart server and built my own. The server could have been the reason why my drives were failing too. I went through several drives during that period and lost a bit of data. 0 issues since then



Thanks for the share.
 
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