SOLVED WD Utility for RED drives with High Load Cycle Counts

[MarknSF]

WD has a utility to update RED drives that are experiencing high load cycle counts (LCC). It's called wd5741 and can be found at:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en

I noticed one of my WD 3TB drives had an LCC of over 23k in less than a month of operation and the counts were increasing by over 100 each hour. Searching I found some users had addressed this using wdidle3 to adjust idle time although it was not specifically approved by WD for use with RED drives.

I used the wd5741 utility on my five 3TB RED drives, three of which took the update. The other two that I had just purchased reported that the update was not needed. So it appears WD has adopted this change as standard. After the update no more issues with LCC.

Hope this helps someone.

 

[Yatti420]

There have been recent reports of RED drives shipping with an 8 second idle timer.. Similiar to the GREEN drives.. I'm confused however is this a firmware update or WDIDLE3 tool?

 

[MarknSF]

I believe it is more like a special wdidle3 tool that changes some parameters. However, it doesn't provide any details on what it actually does. I don't think the firmware version (80.00A80 in my case) changed.

 

[indy]

Nice find, thanks for sharing!
It would be interesting though what the tool actually does.

 

[Yatti420]

So it's not WDIDLE3 according to WD forum post.. http://community.wd.com/t5/News-Ann...T-Load-Unload-Utility-1-21-14/m-p/665833#M425

I'm not sure if WD is taking a new approach on their red.. This "As-Is" disclaimer is at the bottom..

http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/Disclaimer_of_Liability_WD_RED_Utility_As-is.pdf

 

[Ramboxman]

Interesting find, I also received this reply for WD

Thank you for your reply.

Thank you for your questions and for being a Western Digital customer.

This red drive is designed for high duty cycle. This means the drive is designed to be accessed constantly. The high Park cycle count means that the drive is simply not being accessed very much. The IDLE 3 utility is designed for Green Drives. To answer your question of either increasing the time in the Park cycle or completely disabling it. I recommend increasing the time to see if that works well for you. If you completely disable it then you should be checking the drive periodically with diagnostic tests. Your statement about the fact the drive was not set to 8 seconds when you received it. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, I have forwarded that information to our internal drive department.

I believe in the right tool for the right job. I have provided you a link to the tool to change the time for the Park Cycle from 8 seconds to 300 seconds on your red drive.

http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en

If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

 

[sumsum]

Even if wdidle3 is not designed for the RED disks - it works. I have disabled the intelli park function with wdidle3.

 

[MarknSF]

I suspected that what wd5741 did was just changing the Park Cycle time but couldn't be sure it didn't make other invisible changes.

Ramboxman's reply from WD says: "the drive is designed to be accessed constantly" but their product page says:
"Specifically designed and tested for small office and home office, 1-5 bay NAS systems, small media servers and PCs with RAID."

In the environments they list there will usually be long periods (like over night) where the drives are not accessed at all, so a setting of 300 seconds seems like a good compromise of access time versus power consumption.

Now if I can only get my Win 7 TCP/IP stack to perform better I'll be set.

 

[Ramboxman]

I had a new red drive I received last month and the timer was 8 seconds, I used wdidle3 timer and changed it to 300. After reading this post I pulled on drive out and ran the wd5741 utility and it said that the drive does not need to be updated. So I suspect all it that happens is the idle timer is changed to 300. Firmware is 80.00A80.

 

[joeschmuck]

The rationale for 1-5 bay NAS systems is due to the way the drives fight vibration issues. They actually adjust rotational speed amongst the drives slightly to reduce the harmonics. Apparently the drives can only manage up to 5 drives to properly mitigate these harmonics. I have seen nothing which states that six or more drives cannot be used. Now my opinion is everyone should try to mount RED drives in vibration dampeners when possible. Those of us using a computer case, well that shouldn't be hard at all.

As for power savings when the drive parks the heads and turns off the head electronics... That isn't much power we are talking about, nothing like being able to spin down the drives which could save about 3-5 watts or so of power per drive. REDs are not designed with a timer to spin down (as indicated by smartctl) however they can be commanded to spin down manually but I'm not sure I'd recommend that unless you knew what you were doing since FreeNAS seems to actively use the hard drives.

A parking setting of 300 seconds (5 minutes) may still yield a very high LCC if your system accesses the drives shortly after the heads park and does this like clockwork. Maybe you have a plugin that reads/writes to your jail every 10 minutes. My personal preference is to not park the heads in that situation. Maybe someone could write up a tool which could monitor for drive activity and record a date/time stamp of each event for a designated period of time. Some thought would need to go into this in order to capture the data but I'm certain it could be done easily enough. You just can't use the hard drives to store your data.

 

[joeschmuck]

I had a new red drive I received last month and the timer was 8 seconds, I used wdidle3 timer and changed it to 300. After reading this post I pulled on drive out and ran the wd5741 utility and it said that the drive does not need to be updated. So I suspect all it that happens is the idle timer is changed to 300. Firmware is 80.00A80.

That is very good to know.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Interesting find, I also received this reply for WD

............... The IDLE 3 utility is designed for Green Drives. ...................

I have never seen anything made officially for the green drives.

 

[Sir.Robin]

I have lost the taste for the reds.


Sent from my mobile using Tapatalk

 

[crumbz]

I have lost the taste for the reds.

I value your opinion Sir. Robin, can you please elaborate?

Is head parking something that only WD does?

 

[Sir.Robin]

It's just my personal feel. Too much uncertainty.

I guess you read the Green vs. Red thread?
And we got different types now?
And we got a new tool from WD?

I just want it to be what i was promised when i bought the darn thing. If theres a FW fault, give me a bootable ISO so i can flash it without too much hassle.

If i wanna fiddle with some tool to turn stuff on/off or change some behaviour i can get the Greens already. ;)

 

[9C1 Newbee]

If i wanna fiddle with some tool to turn stuff on/off or change some behaviour i can get the Greens already. ;)

Loosing your religion? I have to agree. I despise green drives. They are turds right out of the box. Now, reds are also turds out of the box. Either way you will still need to polish turds via some band aide utility.

 

[joeschmuck]

With the exception of the 8 second head parking timer, I know of no other issues with the Reds. I agree that the timer should either be disabled or set to 300 seconds, not 8 seconds and it should never have crept in there. I wouldn't want 8 seconds on any 3.5" hard drive no matter how you sliced it and it sounds like a setting for a laptop hard drive which is probably reasonable. I'm curious to see what comes out of WD over the next several months and I hope the problem has been addressed. Of course I will check the next time I purchase a Red drive but I'll keep using them unless there is some high failure rate. I have until 24 October 2015 before four of my drives reach the warranty expiration period. If two fail before that time then I may start using a different hard drive.

 

[indy]

The low power consumption still seems to be good reason to go for the Reds:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/red-wd20efrx-wd30efrx-nas,3248-8.html

However I do agree it is kind of ridiculous you have to mod the drive for it to fulfill its intended purpose.
Makes you wonder what else WD might have messed up.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

Question, can the wd reds be updated from freenas or will I have to move the drives to another computer?

 

[GaiusBaltar]

ok, i feel like an idiot, but stupid question before i hose my system: i've got 6 new 2TB WD Reds in my newly built freenas 9.2 box. should i be running this binary directly within freenas or from a linux live CD?
i've tried to run both the 32 and 64 bit versions (just with the -? option) (logged into the console shell as root. 777 perms on both files) and keep getting this error:

Code:

[root@freeNAS /mnt/ZFS_VOL00/stuff]# ./wd5741x64 -?
ELF binary type "0" not known.
bash: ./wd5741x64: cannot execute binary file

ELF binary type "0" not known. bash: ./wd5741x32: cannot execute binary file
what am i doing wrong?