Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe

[9C1 Newbee]

WD40EZRX is a green drive. I am willing to bet it will rack up load cycle counts like a champ. I am interested how this plays out.

EDIT: you beat me to it. But I agree.

 

[cyberjock]

Thanks for your quick response - however, my drive is a green drive, which is why I am concerned about LLC issues. I assume for a green drive I still should be, right?

Doh. You are right. I could have sworn EZRX was Reds.

Not sure what to say. This could be the first signs that WD has changed their firmware in a way that is no longer compatible with changing the idle time via wdidle3. It could also be that your SATA controller has some peculiarity that makes the wdidle3 tool not work properly. I honestly don't know.

 

[Ericloewe]

You could try setting AHCI mode. I can imagine IDE emulation not working.

 

[Trophy]

...thanks Eric for the input - I just tried that but WDIDLE3 the freezes after reporting the serial number.

Any thoughts on whether the disk could simply be faulty? I'm wondering if I should simply return it and get a different one...

Thanks again everyone!

 

[cyberjock]

There isn't enough information to prove the disk is faulty. This could be WD pushing people to go Red if they are running a disk in a server. Remember that wdidle was discontinued years ago (2009 or 2010 I believe) and when it was discontinued WD said that there was no guarantee this would work in the future. Seems they may have changed it.

Unless you can do a SMART test and get an error then you're not going to get an RMA from them. You just might be the first user to find out that Greens are no longer going to be recommended as you can't modify the parking timer. The second you call them for an RMA and say that wdidle3.exe doesn't work they're going to laugh at you and tell you "so what.. that's not supported anyway".

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Or maybe you can exchange the drive if it is not too late.

 

[user0]

I found this thread while picking out hard drives and only read through all of the comments after placing my order, I was concerned I wouldn't be able to modify my green drives. I bought 5 4TB green drives from Newegg and they all had a manufacture date in September of 2014. One drive was bad, I am sending that one back and picked up another green 4TB drive from the local Fry's Electronics and it had a manufacture date of July 2014. All 5 drives have been successfully updated using the wdidle3 tool that came on the most recent Ultimate Boot CD.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I found this thread while picking out hard drives and only read through all of the comments after placing my order, I was concerned I wouldn't be able to modify my green drives. I bought 5 4TB green drives from Newegg and they all had a manufacture date in September of 2014. One drive was bad, I am sending that one back and picked up another green 4TB drive from the local Fry's Electronics and it had a manufacture date of July 2014. All 5 drives have been successfully updated using the wdidle3 tool that came on the most recent Ultimate Boot CD.

Thank you so much for letting us know. This is good news. I'd hate to loose the green drives as an option. It also seems to suggest that Trophy has some sort of hardware issue.

 

[cyberjock]

Definitely sounding more like Trophy has a problem with his system. May be the disk but could be something else. It could also be that the firmware from one plant isn't compatible with wdidle while the firmware from another plant still is. In any case, without a SMART failure he won't qualify for an RMA. :/

 

[9C1 Newbee]

...should simply return it and get a different one...

If you can, then yes. Without a damn doubt. ;)

 

[Starpulkka]

I have ion server witch came wd blue drive (i thought 3.5 year ago that blue drive is ok) and this week i decided to install guardian to it and that gived me red warning. So i decided peek s.m.a.r.t. my self and this it what i found.

Code:

Start Stop Count 903098
Load Cycle Count 8121990

So it might be a good mention in frontpage that you should check blue drive also.. SSC is weird because i have hdd set on server drive always on.
Drive works fine though, but i cloned it today just in case of failure..
Edit: oh and wdidle3 tool telled that setting was on 4 second so i now changed it.. Should have remembered put some smartmontools or check things more often than 3.5 years interval..

Edit:2 even wdidle3 tool did successful change parktimer it has no effect on parkin behavior on my blue drive. Drive has been very very slow, and i thought its my vpn connection, but it's the blue drive what is slowing down.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I thought I had a bunch of Load Cycle Counts with 466,640. Looks like I was WAY wrong.

 

[porotikos]

hello. first time poster here. i run a windows pc that includes an internal 2tb western digital green hdd, and also 1 external western digital elements drive (2tb). from what i know the elements drives all have green hdds inside them.

i am currently concerning selling some drives i have and getting one external 4tb western digital drive and one 6tb internal western digital green drive. but reading this thread i have many concerns.

my first question is if i can still change the interval time between head parkings in these new drives. both internal and external. (actually i have never read if using
WDIDLE3.exe is available for external drives. is it?). secondly, if iam seeding torrents from one of my drives, does it mean that the drive is constantly in use so there wont be any head parking at all? or does head parking occur, even if the hdd is in constant use? same thing i want to ask about the other drive , the external one. i want to plug it in a raspberry pi and use it as an external drive for playback of music and videos. raspberry doesnt ever shut down. it is permanently on. does that mean that the heads will park and unpark all the time? or the heads will be always parked until i watch a movie or listen to music?

i am just trying to figure out what is best for my situation. sorry if my questions are nooby and perhaps stupid

ps. i wonder hasnt western digital fixed the 8 second interval issues? it is so strange...

 

[solarisguy]

@porotikos, I am confused... Where does FreeNAS come into play?

In case you intend to run FreeNAS, two comments:

• do not use external drives;
• hard drives (the entire system) are meant to spin all the time at the constant speed, as it is felt that it prolongs life of the system.

Unrelated to FreeNAS: you need to use SATA for the firmware updates.

 

[cyberjock]

They haven't "fixed" it because it's not "broken". Would you say compact cars are broken because they can't tow 2 tons? That's literally the problem.

The problem is that Greens are meant for desktops. For that workload, the 8 second timer is perfectly fine. The problem is that if you buy a desktop drive and put it in a server there may be problems. In the case of the WD Greens, the 8 second delay is a problem. The solution is to either use the wdidle, or buy drives that are more suited (and more expensive) for your server.

I cannot vouch for whether the external drive would work or not. I can tell you that DOS doesn't do USB, so if you think you are going to make a DOS boot disk and use it to change the timer for the external drive you are in for a surprise.

 

[porotikos]

first of all i need to apologise because i came to this forum after googling for intellipark. perhaps i shouldnt have come in this forum as it is nas related.
i do not intend to use the drives in a server. the drives will simply be installed in my desktop pc, and all i want to di is simply stream their music in my raspberry pi at times. thing is, raspberry doesnt have a shut down button or feature. therefore i wonder if that will make the hdd heads being parked every 8 seconds...
i jumped in the forum because the thread about wdidle was excellent. it is perhaps the best thread in the whole internet. and my question would be if it can be used in new wd green drives or if wd have fixed the issue by increasing the second between parks. it seems that they havent... thank you for your answers guys

 

[9C1 Newbee]

It is very difficult to figure out what the hell you are talking about, due to the lack of capitalization. As far as I know, if a green drive is powered up and there is no activity, the heads will be parked after 8 seconds. I would think the green drives would work ok because the use you described is exactly what they are intended to do. As far as WD fixing the drives, reread cyberjock's post. He even broke it down Barney style for you. I can't think of a better way to articulate his point any better. Why are you concerned with head parking anyway?

The whole deal is this. Us guys running greens in ZFS (read raid) are not even in the same ballpark as you. We are taking cheap green drives and modifying them for a purpose WD never intended.

What you need to do:
#1 Find the shift key
#2 Build you a FreeNAS server ;)
#3 Then worry about head parking.

 

[porotikos]

thank you for your answer. cheers

 

[AlainD]

Hi

Has anybody tested it on the 6TB green (WD Green Desktop WD60EZRX 6TB)?

Alain

 

[rogerh]

I would have thought that a bit torrent server on a PC might be a use case where head parking actually was a bad thing. As far as the the external drive is concerned, the simplest thing is to dismantle it and temporarily put the hdd in a PC to run wdidle3 on it. You can probably get the security seals off in one piece with a bit of IPA if warranty is an issue.