WD Caviar Green HDDs Suffer from a Critical Design Flaw

I ran it, did not seem to hurt anything.

I don't think this is a factor, at least in my case. It appears it may be a factor for certain OS that poll the drive constantly (Linux). WD says the green drives are not intended for such an environment.

I've been reading the article and other links for a half hour or so.

Short story:

WD says you can download an app and change the head park setting to every 300 seconds (5 minutes) rather than the much more often default (every 8 seconds?).

Well---I just ran Passmark's Diskcheckup, which gives you the raw numbers for the relevant SMART category, which is load cycle count.

My WD Green 15EADS is about 18 months old. According to Diskcheckup, it has been powered on for 7440 hours and has a load cycle count of 21781. That is under 3 load cycles per hour---not every 8 seconds and much less often than even the corrected frequency of every 5 minutes (12 times per hour).

So--I am doing nothing.

For the record: I use the drive for backup only. It does not contain an OS.

Windows does it as well as Linux. I monitored my drive on Windows 7 for a while and observed the load cycle counters advance at a high rate. You should not see the SMART load/unload counters much higher than the power cycle count IMO. If you do then you should probably adjust the drives timeout.

These drives are rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles. Over 5 years that is 7 load/unload cycles per hour. Of course your drive could fail with fewer than 300,000 - that is just a mean value I expect. I saw more than this (7/hour) on mine so set the timeout for 5 minutes. There isn't much reason to be parking the heads that often if power consumption is not an issue.

LOL!
That doesn't surprise me at all. I had one of those for a few months. Worst piece of hardware I ever bought.
Tried WDIDLE3 and other suggested fixes to no avail. It was unusable.
It didn't cost me much so I thew it in the bin & replaced it with a Seagate.

The more I read about this, the more conflicting information I get. However, it seems to be that I can't really hurt my 1.5 TB Green drives by using this.

That being said, I'll take them off the RAID controller card for now, but in terms of the WD Utility, are there steps to follow that are starightforward? I'm leary about the firmware update portion, since my drives aren't listed on the official WD page.

Zirro said:

LOL!
That doesn't surprise me at all. I had one of those for a few months. Worst piece of hardware I ever bought.
Tried WDIDLE3 and other suggested fixes to no avail. It was unusable.
It didn't cost me much so I thew it in the bin & replaced it with a Seagate.

That was wise

DeaconFrost said:

The more I read about this, the more conflicting information I get. However, it seems to be that I can't really hurt my 1.5 TB Green drives by using this.

That being said, I'll take them off the RAID controller card for now, but in terms of the WD Utility, are there steps to follow that are starightforward? I'm leary about the firmware update portion, since my drives aren't listed on the official WD page.

It is a firmware update, but from what I gleaned all it does is change a timeout value stored in the firmware.

I must say my 20EARS 2 TB Green drive is the best performing and reliable drive I have, and I have a 750GB Seagate, 2 1TB Blacks, and a 320 GB WDC Blue (among an assortment of other external drives).

GeneO said:

It is a firmware update,

Even though my 15EARS drives aren't listed as applicable drives?