Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe

[flyfrank]

Hi all,
first of all thanks a lot for discussing this threat, it helped me a lot fixing my WD Red´s.
Fixing is the right question, after I used the tool for my new Red´s, I have an increase of ~50 each day each harddrive. Does someone having a clue of it is okay or not?
thanks in advance

Frank

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I have drives with 100,000+ load cycles. I imagine it is okay. I prefer to completely disable the feature. But that's just me.

 

[flyfrank]

100.000 wow...
So I guess ~50 per day should be oaky then

Thanks
Frank

 

[9C1 Newbee]

The drives are said to withstand cycle 300,000 times over a life time. At 50 cycles per day it would take you 14 years to reach it. Your drives will be long gone by then.

 

[flyfrank]

Yes indeet, 14 years for a hdd would be ....;):)
Thanks for the info!
Frank

 

[solarisguy]

I have in service (I oversee systems that have...) six hard drives that are spinning 24x7 for the past 10+ years. And some of them for 12+ years, by their make date they could have been running for 14+ years...

Last year, I helped with a migration of a 20 year old home PC to a modern laptop (don't ask, not my home). The disk inside was not noisy, so maybe that is why it lasted that long despite so many power events.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Older hard drives seem to be way more reliable. Then again, we are transferring WAY more data than ever before. Seems like reliability is less and less of a factor on anything you buy these days.

 

[solarisguy]

Older hard drives seem to be way more reliable.

:) Exactly!

They only seem to be way more reliable. When comparing per MB transferred, the new ones win :). And with storage only MB (GB / TB / PB :)) count.

However, not every hard drive fails after 1, 2, 4, 8 or even 16 years of service. And earlier, I meant to say just that...

 

[Dewar]

Great Info Cyberjock,

I will sort out my Reds asap...

I particularly liked your little observational rant "You used to pay more for higher RPM. But now the average consumer is so stupid the hard drive manufacturers will sell you a drive at a slower speed, and then call it a feature"... and very true too.

It made me laugh because it reminds me of when the "Organic" ... lol ... feature, came into vegetables... it was the same average consumers you refer too, that also didn't realise that the vegetables they were paying more for, were the same ones, but that had had the crap left on them without being washed...

Thanks again for the great insight :)

 

[jimmyt]

thanks for the great thread! just downloaded the ultimate bootcd and quickly changed my green 4tb to 300 seconds.. date on my drive is 9/7/14 I have 3 more on order and will do the same with them.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Make sure you follow up by verifying the load counts are under control in SMART.

 

[jimmyt]

thats the plan.. still learning may way around the shell command line and trying to get a handle on scripting.. :)

 

[9C1 Newbee]

You and me both. I have come a long way. So much further to go.

 

[Krowvin]

Thank you for the information! Here I was researching VPN and SSH when I stumbled on this. You've got to love the FreeNAS forums. A "Google" in its own right. This guide was/is very informative. I checked my REDs individually and they were between 38-41 cycle counts after a months use. So I figure ~480 cycles a year per drive. It's safe to assume with the server running 24/7 the Intellipark feature is disabled or set fairly high.

 

[joeschmuck]

I have the timers disabled on my Reds and have for quite some time. Four of my drives are at ~18425 Hours, ~259 Load Cycles, two of my drives are at ~14500 hours with ~50 Load Cycles. The first four didn't have the timers disabled until about 6 months after I got them. All SMART tests are great and I strongly suspect I will get over 3 years of life out of them without any issues. Hope I didn't just jinks myself.

 

[britgeezer]

Very interesting and educational thread. One question I don't see is what best to do once the WD Green reaches a high cycle.
Here is the error message I'm getting.

StableBit Scanner
S.M.A.R.T. Warning on "SERVER".
One or more disks are suspect:

• WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 ATA Device - 1 warnings
  • Case: Server
  • Bay: Upper 3TB
  • The head of this hard drive has parked 319,644 times. After 300,000 parking cycles the drive may be in danger of developing problems. Drives normally park their head when they are powered down and activate their head when they are powered back up. Excessive head parking can be caused by overzealous power management settings either in the Operating System or in the hard drive's firmware.

You are receiving this message because you have set up email notifications to be sent to this address from the StableBit Scanner.

I can reset the parking time to 300, but that will not change the existing count or will it? Would I be better off turning the feature off? The drive are 1-3 years old but rarely turned off.

Thanks again

 

[joeschmuck]

Stablebit Scanner is for Windows, right? It's not a FreeNAS item.

However you could run the WDIDLE on your drive to change the timer to 300 which would reduce the rate of the head unloading. You cannot do anything about the current value.

 

[britgeezer]

Yes, you are correct. Thanks for the reply maybe FreeNAS will be on the next Server update.
You have interesting information here :)

 

[Yatti420]

Always change the green to disabled or 300.. I disabled mine..

Sent from my SGH-I257M using Tapatalk 2

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I disabled mine as well. Maybe it is all in my head (no pun) but they seem to perform a bit better too.