Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe

cyberjock

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Mar 25, 2012
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Now you see why I don't recommend the APM stuff. And that's specifically why I said:

Right, but what other things are set with an APM of less than 255? That's what I'd like to know. It would kind of suck to trade intellipark for spindown(or something else).

Nobody has that answer, so why you'd try to do something that is off the beaten path(with your SERVER even) is beyond me.
 

FlyingPersian

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Jan 27, 2014
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Hey
So I just read your article and I compared my numbers from my last SMART report (yesterday) to yours:


4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 24


9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 1957
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 24
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 83


So my Power_On_Hours is around 16 time less than yours.. So when I multiply my Load_Cycle_Count by that number I get around 1304 - which is a pretty good estimate of my Load_Cycle_Count for the next 3+ years right?

Also the difference between my Start_Stop_Count and Power_Cycle_Count is 0, so this would mean that my disk hasn't gone to sleep at all, right (my other two disks look about the same)?
Do I need to change my timer of 8 seconds than or should I just leave everything the way it is?
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
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Hey
So I just read your article and I compared my numbers from my last SMART report (yesterday) to yours:





So my Power_On_Hours is around 16 time less than yours.. So when I multiply my Load_Cycle_Count by that number I get around 1304 - which is a pretty good estimate of my Load_Cycle_Count for the next 3+ years right?

Also the difference between my Start_Stop_Count and Power_Cycle_Count is 0, so this would mean that my disk hasn't gone to sleep at all, right (my other two disks look about the same)?
Do I need to change my timer of 8 seconds than or should I just leave everything the way it is?
I recommend you leave the drive firmware alone, it's working fine and as you guessed you are not sleeping however your heads are parking periodically, looks like on average once just over 23 hours (once a day).
 

KempelofDoom

Explorer
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Apr 11, 2014
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Anyone have links for the cd image that I can use to boot the box and disable the parking? I don't have any dos disks anymore and making one with the tool is more hassle than needed if they provide something I can burn and boot from.
 

warri

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diedrichg

Wizard
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Dec 4, 2012
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Nope, no issues, it just keeps the heads from parking. Absolutely must watch the YouTube video to do it right.
 

diedrichg

Wizard
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Dec 4, 2012
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Be sure to set the drive to IDE in the bios, then run the utility. And make sure it's the ONLY drive attached!
 

Grendell

Dabbler
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Apr 27, 2014
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Actually, I just set 5 WD Greens at the same time with WDIDLE3.EXE from the ubcd. The util hung when I did a sixth drive by itself. Reboot, Retry, and everything appeared to work fine.

Thanks for all the great info, everyone! This forum is excellent. I've never seen a better signal to noise ratio.
 

Yatti420

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Aug 12, 2012
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This procedure should be run on every wd green/red just to be safe..

Sent from my SGH-I257M using Tapatalk 2
 

KempelofDoom

Explorer
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Apr 11, 2014
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So I pulled the 3 WD Green 3TB disks that were in my pool and ran the wdidle3 tool on them and disabled the park feature. Plugged them back in the same way they came out and started up the box. Those 3 disks are not being recognized and now my pool is unknown. Do I just undo what I did and cross my fingers or is there a way to recover without re-enabling the head park feature?
 

Yatti420

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You removed the drives from pool? That is not required

Sent from my SGH-I257M using Tapatalk 2
 

KempelofDoom

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Apr 11, 2014
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I shut the server down, then pulled the drives. Took them to another pc and ran the wdidle3 tool on them one at a time. Then reinstalled the drives and powered the server back up. It was then that I saw the error messages.
 

diedrichg

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For anybody reading this in the future - I had (3) 1TB Blues that I ran with this, turns out they do not have a head park timeout so you don't need to bother running them through this process.
 

joeschmuck

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So I pulled the 3 WD Green 3TB disks that were in my pool and ran the wdidle3 tool on them and disabled the park feature. Plugged them back in the same way they came out and started up the box. Those 3 disks are not being recognized and now my pool is unknown. Do I just undo what I did and cross my fingers or is there a way to recover without re-enabling the head park feature?
The tool will have no effect on on how you drives work with respect to the pool. Also you can place the drive in any order back into your machine, it doesn't matter. You should specify "exactly" what you did starting with shutting down your FreeNAS machine, and like Yatti420 indicated, hopefully you didn't do anything to your system prior to shutting it down and pulling the drives.

You should also explain why you needed to pull the drives from your machine, could be lack of CD/DVD drive I guess.
 

joeschmuck

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What was the OS on the other machine? Don't say Windows.
 

KempelofDoom

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The tool will have no effect on on how you drives work with respect to the pool. Also you can place the drive in any order back into your machine, it doesn't matter. You should specify "exactly" what you did starting with shutting down your FreeNAS machine, and like Yatti420 indicated, hopefully you didn't do anything to your system prior to shutting it down and pulling the drives.

You should also explain why you needed to pull the drives from your machine, could be lack of CD/DVD drive I guess.

The youtube video and a previous response says to take the drive to another pc, set the bios to treat the drive as ata and to boot from the cd. So I did that and then ran the tool on each drive.

I ran it because I have been getting spindle timeout errors and it would cause my server to crash. My hope was that disabling the park feature I could help prevent the crashes.
 

joeschmuck

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spindle timeout errors have nothing to do with head parking as far as I know. What was the exact error message and where was that displayed? In an SSH window or Shell window, what does smartctl -x /dev/ada0 result in? Change ada0 to the drives you have. Post the results. To be honest, I'd prefer you open an new thread with the problem you have and the results of the test.
 

KempelofDoom

Explorer
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Apr 11, 2014
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Here's the error I got. Was told to run the wdidle tool to disable the park feature so this error would no longer happen. Seems like the pool had some type of failure and I'm losing 5 seconds of data.

> ahcich8: is 00000000 cs 00001000 ss 00001000 rs 00001000 tfd 50 serr 00000000 cmd 10008c17
> (ada7:ahcich8:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 08 c0 e1 8a 40 11 00 00 00 00 00
> (ada7:ahcich8:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout
> (ada7:ahcich8:0:0:0): Retrying command

The output during boot said that I need to run zpool import -F pool, then run a scrub. I ran the import and it seems that the pool is there but not reporting size so running a scrub with fingers crossed.
 
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