WD Red Drive Head Parking - New Tool from WD

I was in a similar position to you recently, trying to test a new Red drive and ensure WD's head parking was set to a reasonable value. Before I heard about the new Red utility listed above I used WDIdle3 with the /R option to figure out the factory default. WDIdle3 said it was 300, i.e. 5 minutes, which is the max value it would set anyway so the factory default was good. I later got hold of the Red utility and that didn't give the specifics WDIdle3 reported but told me "no adjustment required". I wouldn't use WDIdle3 to actually try to set a value on a Red drive, but I don't think you can do any damage just using it to retrieve information off the drive.

I've got both UBCD and Parted Magic on a usb boot stick and I ran both WD and PM extended diagnostics on the drive a couple of times before installing it. After both the diagnostics and quite some time just sitting in the little test box I have the load/unload counts were just about the same as the power on counts, so I think the setup is ok and the WDIdle3 report accurate even though it's not officially approved for use on the Reds. If WDIdle3 says the timeout is 300 then you're probably OK, though I'd still recommend using the UBCD and Parted Magic utilities to check for any other issues before installing it for actual use.