WD Caviar Green HDDs Suffer from a Critical Design Flaw

[Gary]

I ran it, did not seem to hurt anything.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[GeneO]

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.

 

[Zirro]

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.

 

[sandman]

I have used and this is just guessing over the years in builds at least 30-50 WD hard drives and most are Black version but just recently bought a Green version for in an external drive which seems to be working perfectly. I have had to RMA 1 drive in over 20 years of service most other drives like Samsung, Hitachi have bad sector counts or something like that which is not a failure but a warning of failure. Lets keep WD.

 

[DeaconFrost]

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.

 

[Everlong]

Ran it before. Have two WD drives connected inside PC (Caviar Black 750GB, Caviar Green 1TB) and it applied the fix to both. Both have been running fine with no side affects so far.

 

[GeneO]

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

 

[GeneO]

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).

 

[DeaconFrost]

It is a firmware update,

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

 

[Stormkitty]

Despite what the site says RE: applicable hard drives, it seems the utility will work on ANY recent Western Digital product, as it applied the change to my 2TB Caviar Black even though it wasn't part of the list.

 

[pcunite]

I have two of the WD20EARS and the first thing I did was to turn off the head parking. The thing is though I had to boot using only 4GB of ram, it seems that having more than that caused the utility to hang.

 

[mjf]

I have a recent WD10EADS as a USB external backup drive.
33 Power on hours, load/unload cycle count 281. Guess I probably need to do the fix! BUT

I'm not sure if the DOS wdidle3.exe can or should be applied to external USB connected HDDs containing WD10EADS.

Has anyone looked at this?

 

[biggles1000]

and to think I was strongly considering getting a WD Green for my next build... :S
Looks like it's back to Seagate for me then :/

 

[pooch]

Funny I am really happy with my WD10EAVS Its only used for backups so it hasn't run much but it runs ok

 

[Rhammstein]

For me, this actually has me leaning 'toward' WD for a drive, not away. I don't think anyone considering a WD drive should necessarily walk away from it. There's no reason to think it won't be fixed, research it and either avoid the affected drive, or simply apply this update.

This is really only an issue for a somewhat aged to just old drive. Any new purchase isn't an issue, other than applying the update.

 

[mjf]

I have a recent WD10EADS as a USB external backup drive.
33 Power on hours, load/unload cycle count 281. Guess I probably need to do the fix! BUT

I'm not sure if the DOS wdidle3.exe can or should be applied to external USB connected HDDs containing WD10EADS.

Has anyone looked at this?

BUMP

I'd put it in Performance & Maintenance but for the necessary preamble.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I have a recent WD10EADS as a USB external backup drive.
33 Power on hours, load/unload cycle count 281. Guess I probably need to do the fix! BUT

I'm not sure if the DOS wdidle3.exe can or should be applied to external USB connected HDDs containing WD10EADS.

Has anyone looked at this?

BUMP

I'd put it in Performance & Maintenance but for the necessary preamble.

MJF:

Off the top of my head, I think the critical factor is the absolute number of load cycles.

It looks like you simply don't power on that external very often---which keeps the load cycle count down. Which is good.

I have over 21,000 load cycles with no issues. My drive is internal and on all the time (over 7000 hours in 18 months).

I don't think you have anything to worry about. Far from it. Your load cycle count is very low and growing very slowly.

 

[mjf]

Off the top of my head, I think the critical factor is the absolute number of load cycles.

It looks like you simply don't power on that external very often---which keeps the load cycle count down. Which is good.

I have over 21,000 load cycles with no issues. My drive is internal and on all the time (over 7000 hours in 18 months).

I don't think you have anything to worry about. Far from it. Your load cycle count is very low and growing very slowly.

thanks Ignatzatsonic,
you're probably right and I'm just making work for myself.

 

[s31]

and to think I was strongly considering getting a WD Green for my next build... :S
Looks like it's back to Seagate for me then :/

there is no problem..

All the Western Digital Caviar Green HDDs that are shipping now are set to park their heads after 8 seconds of inactivity, so this fix is required if such problems are encountered.

WD Caviar Green HDDs Suffer from a Critical Design Flaw - Softpedia