Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe

[Ericloewe]

I *think* I have four 2TB EZRXs in my old server, plus two 500GB EARSs for booting. One of the EARS is a disaster waiting to happen (but they're both waaayyy beyond their Load Cycle Rating).

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I have the same story with a 2TB green drive. I once trusted ALL my data on it under Windows Home Server (stupid stupid stupid). I never WDidled it either. It is now WDidled and used as my jail drive. It gets hammered harder than my ex-wife everyday and still keeps clicking.

 

[statalite]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry to bump this thread.

I have been looking at a couple of different WD drives to upgrade my PVR with.
Namely the WD20EARX and WD20EZRX. The Former is supposed to be a decicated AV drive, it uses less power (4 watts to 6 watts of the WD20EZRX) going by the specs but I wonder if this is marketing hype?
Reading on forums it appears that I can use the cheaper WD20EZRX (even though this is not an AV drive will it make any difference?) if i set the jumpers to the 3Gbps setting becasue the PVR is old and uses the Sata I type.

I am here to ask about the timer on these drives, im a noob but would be able to change this value, would this procedure still be of benefit when adding the drive to a PVR? If so what would the recomended amount of time be if any (or disabled).

Thank you for any advice.
Statalite

 

[cyberjock]

That depends on how the PVR works. To be honest, I wouldn't use Greens in a PVR environment to preclude the possibility of problems.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry to bump this thread.

I have been looking at a couple of different WD drives to upgrade my PVR with.
Namely the WD20EARX and WD20EZRX. The Former is supposed to be a decicated AV drive, it uses less power (4 watts to 6 watts of the WD20EZRX) going by the specs but I wonder if this is marketing hype?
Reading on forums it appears that I can use the cheaper WD20EZRX (even though this is not an AV drive will it make any difference?) if i set the jumpers to the 3Gbps setting becasue the PVR is old and uses the Sata I type.

I am here to ask about the timer on these drives, im a noob but would be able to change this value, would this procedure still be of benefit when adding the drive to a PVR? If so what would the recomended amount of time be if any (or disabled).

Thank you for any advice.
Statalite

WD Purples might be more up your alley.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I wonder if this is marketing hype?..........will it make any difference?

That is the question. Isn't it? Nobody can seem to answer this. Until there is a definitive answer to this question, I will continue to use green drives and disable the timer. I could care less about 2 watts of power anyway.

Please explain this talk of jumper settings. As far as I have seen/heard SATA is backwards compatible. I wouldn't monkey with the jumpers.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

You guys beat me to the punch.

WD Purples might be more up your alley.

I know the purple drives are for PVR duty. But I gotta ask "what difference does it make"?

 

[cyberjock]

Please take any discussions about the Purple drives elsewhere. This thread is for hacking the WD Green drives.

Thanks. :)

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Please take any discussions about the Purple drives elsewhere. This thread is for hacking the WD Green drives.

Thanks. :)

Alright DAD! :p

But I still would like to know what he means by changing the jumper settings.

EDIT:

Placing the jumper across pins 5 and 6 will force the drive to use the slower SATA 1.5Gbits/s (OPT1) transfer speed. This is only necessary for certain SATA controllers that do not properly implement the SATA 3.0 Gb/s speed negotiation, like the VIA VT8237 and VT8237R south bridge chips.

Ok, here is what my google came up with.

 

[statalite]

That depends on how the PVR works. To be honest, I wouldn't use Greens in a PVR environment to preclude the possibility of problems.

WD Purples might be more up your alley.

Didn't know these existed so another good option.
Interestingly these still use "IntelliPower" so I wonder if they have the timing set to 8 seconds? Il see what I can find on google.
I will probably go for the purple drive, just need to work out what the timing is and if I need to change it, you wouldnt think so with a drive designed specifically for surveillance or in my case pvr?

Alright DAD! :p

But I still would like to know what he means by changing the jumper settings.

EDIT:

Ok, here is what my google came up with.

Thats about it really, from other peoples experiences of putting the green drives into a pvr with a particular model of pvr they found that to get it working for their specific model they had to change the jumpers. Some of the pvr models are 6-7 years old so it maybe some incompatability with the chipset, im not sure.

 

[mattlach]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry to bump this thread.

I have been looking at a couple of different WD drives to upgrade my PVR with.
Namely the WD20EARX and WD20EZRX. The Former is supposed to be a decicated AV drive, it uses less power (4 watts to 6 watts of the WD20EZRX) going by the specs but I wonder if this is marketing hype?
Reading on forums it appears that I can use the cheaper WD20EZRX (even though this is not an AV drive will it make any difference?) if i set the jumpers to the 3Gbps setting becasue the PVR is old and uses the Sata I type.

I am here to ask about the timer on these drives, im a noob but would be able to change this value, would this procedure still be of benefit when adding the drive to a PVR? If so what would the recomended amount of time be if any (or disabled).

Thank you for any advice.
Statalite

Is this a standalone PVR, or are you having a PVR write to FreeNAS via ethernet?

 

[statalite]

Is this a standalone PVR, or are you having a PVR write to FreeNAS via ethernet?

standalone PVR. I have my sights set on a WD Purple but haven't purchased it yet.

 

[Norlig]

A collegue of mine informed me about this after I told him I swapped to WD Greens in my freenas box.
In the process of resilvering them out still, but I have set them all to 300 seconds, doing 1 disc per week.
I read there were some issues when disabling this on the newer drives?

got WD40EZRX by the way, very simple to do, I did not move it to another PC either, just powered down the NAS, disconnected all the drives but one, set to IDE and booted the ultimate boot CD from a USB stick and did the changes, really easy.

 

[bilson]

I have 2TB WD Green in a windows DVR that stays up 24/7. It racked up 160K head parks in just 6 months, before I first came across this info.

There were reports that completely disabling head parks via the tool can negatively impact the performance of the drive and for me it did. I confirmed by running hdtach. Backing down to the max allowed value, returned performance to normal, and head parks are no longer going up rapidly. Drive has been in use for about 2 years so far.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I can't see how disabling head parking would negatively impact performance.

 

[adrianwi]

I never got around to doing this on the 4x2TB greens in my old, old ReadyNAS unit. Think they are rated for 300,000 and these are still going :D

 

[joeschmuck]

For the small amount of time on these drives and the fact that they never spin down, yea, that is a very high load count.

 

[bilson]

I can't see how disabling head parking would negatively impact performance.

It was two years ago, I can't remember for sure but this post claims that such behavior can occur if you don't power cycle drive in between. I do remember that I observed decrease in performance.
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=63276d6f794f6d31e53c72fc63cc855d&topic=15554.15

 

[9C1 Newbee]

It was two years ago, I can't remember for sure but this post claims that such behavior can occur if you don't power cycle drive in between. I do remember that I observed decrease in performance.
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=63276d6f794f6d31e53c72fc63cc855d&topic=15554.15

I skimmed through that thread. Other than power cycling the drives after wdidle, I see nothing about negatively impacting performance. What post in particular? From personal experience, the drives are noticeably quicker to react. I have not ran into any downsides by disabling the timer. And guess what. I don't have a failed drive every 2 weeks now. Oh and by the way, if I were using unraid, I would give it the same treatment.

 

[Linkman]

Just to add another data point or two...

I just finished setting the idle time out on my three 3TB WD Greens (WD30EZRX) last night, these were purchased from NewEgg within the past month. The out of the box idle time out was set to 8 secs, and I changed them with WDIDLE3 up to 300 secs (v1.05 from the UBCD 5.3.3 booted on a flash drive).

Also checked the three 3TB WD Reds (WD30EFRX) that I have, and two of the Reds were also set at 8 secs out of the box (older drives, manufactured in second half of 2013). I set those to 300 seconds as well. The third Red was manufactured in Dec 2014, and it was already at 300 seconds out of the box.