Run wdidle3.exe on FreeNAS box?

[Kevin Horton]

I'm getting ready to build my first FreeNAS box, and hope to use a few WD Green drives. That implies I'll need to adjust the HD head park settings using wdidle3.exe.

The FreeNAS system motherboard will be a SuperMicro X10SL7-F, with a G3258 (or similar) CPU.

How to run wdidle3.exe? The problem is that I don't own a Windows PC. We've got two Mac laptops, and a Mac Mini - that's it. I've done a fair bit of Googling, but haven't found any hints on a way to adjust the HD head park settings using this hardware - I could boot into Windows, but I don't have access to SATA connected to the main board on any of these guys.

I could buy a cheap used PC, but I wouldn't have any other use for it, so it would be collecting dust on a shelf in the basement most of the time. We're trying to downsize to move into smaller digs, so I'm not anxious to collect something else that is only rarely used.

Would it be possible to use my future FreeNAS box to do this, if it has an optical drive to run the Universal Boot CD? I would remove the USB sticks with the FreeNAS system on them, unplug all but one WD Green drive, and boot from the optical drive. Run wdidle3.exe on one drive, shutdown, change drives and repeat until I've done them all. Will this work?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[danb35]

Sure, you could do it on the FreeNAS box, or on anything else that could boot UBCD. It's been a while since I played with WDIDLE3.exe, but my memory is that it will handle multiple drives being attached at the same time (letting you specify which one(s) you want to change), so you wouldn't need to power down and swap drives for each one.

 

[Jailer]

And you can run it all from the IPMI interface by mounting the ubcd image, no optical drive needed.

 

[Kevin Horton]

And you can run it all from the IPMI interface by mounting the ubcd image, no optical drive needed.

Would I put the image on a USB thumb drive, then be able to boot from it, using IPMI? I'm not finding that described in any of the SuperMicro manuals, but maybe I'm not looking for the right words.

 

[danb35]

You can mount the image as virtual storage using IPMI, which is what @Jailer was referring to.