WD Red drives park their heads like WD Green drives?

The WD30EFRX does not behave that way. On my Pro-6 I have 185 load-cycles over about 10000 hours. Spindown is enabled.
On the RN102 I have 4 load-cycles over about 5000 hours.

I'd contact WDC support.

StephenB wrote:
The WD30EFRX does not behave that way.

Thanks, that's good to know.

StephenB wrote:
I'd contact WDC support.

Have. Telephone support told me that the "600,000" figure in the datasheet was just a description of one of the conditions under which they tested the drives, not the maximum rating, and that the drive could withstand a limitless number of load cycles... So I opened a case via their website. Now I'm waiting for a response.

I think they advertise a utility that lets you change the settings on the RED drives. This is not WDIDLE, its something newer (and supported). You might ask about it.

Excerpts from the response I just received:

I wrote:
Is there a limit to the number of load cycles guaranteed by WD for this drive? What is that limit? Western Digital wrote: 600,000 cycles is where Western Digital guarantees the integrity of the data

I wrote:
Is it normal for this drive to be parking its heads every 24 seconds, or is it misconfigured? Western Digital wrote: not every 24 seconds .... but it is normal because it has the same "Intellipower" feature that the green drives have.

I wrote:
Do you recommend that I reconfigure the drive to park its heads less frequently (or never)? How can I do that? Western Digital wrote: It cannot be reconfigured out of Western Digital's premises .... [doing that] would void its warranty.

and...

Western Digital wrote:
Since it seems to be loading the cycles quicker than it should we recommend to have the unit replaced

So it seems that this drive is indeed not working as expected. I'll post a followup here when I receive my replacement drive.

An update:

I received a new 4TB Red drive this weekend and used it to replace a deteriorating 2TB drive in my Pro Pioneer. I didn't think to check the SMART stats until 16 hours into the resync process (the NAS had to do three resyncs total, because it now contains a mix of 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB drives), at which point it was showing 570 load cycles... Which disappointed me, because it seemed to imply that the new drive was parking its heads every 100 seconds or so. That's better than once every 24 seconds like the old drive, but still meant that this one would reach the maximum 600K cycles in less than two years.

But I waited another couple of hours for the resyncs to finish, then checked again... And the load count was still at 570.

And now it's been another three hours, and the load count is still at 570.

I'll check again tomorrow and post another update. If the count is still at 570, I'll be satisfied that this drive is working as it should be, and that the old drive was simply defective.

Bad news: After 44 hours, the Load Cycle Count on the new Red drive is up to 2054. Checking the Idle3 timer on this new drive and the old Red drive (which now has 72482 load cycles after 445 power-on hours) shows that it is set to 0x50 (8 seconds) on each, the same as a Green drive.

So I guess my choices are:

• Just live with it, and hope I can RMA each Red drive (and its replacement, and that one's replacement, etc.) when it gets near 600K load cycles.


• Disable each drive's Idle3 timer using idle3ctl, although this will apparently void the warranty.


• Send these crappy drives back and buy more Seagate ST4000VN000s instead.

Sigh.

Since this does not happen with the wd30efrx, you could also continue to push WDC on this.

Resolution:

The answer to the question that I posed in the title of this thread is "Yes" for the 4TB Red drives (WD40EFRX). This makes them unsuitable for use in my ReadyNAS boxes.

Western Digital support has been excellent -- and they have agreed that my WD40EFRX drives are returnable under warranty -- but they haven't yet acknowledged that their WD40EFRX Idle3 timer setting is wrong and should be changed, so I'm sure that any new WD40EFRX replacements I buy will just have the same problem. Therefore, I'm going to return the WD40EFRX drives and replace them with Seagate ST4000VN000 drives (which I've already been using with no problems).

Maybe WDC will figure this out sometime soon, and start shipping their 4TB Red drives with the Idle3 timer disabled (or set to a much higher value than the current 8 seconds). I hope they do, because I'd like to have more than one NAS drive supplier.

Is there any hope WD will resolve this via firmware? I just bought 9 of these and would hate to have to return them all. I just found this thread. Or should I not bother and immediately return for the Seagate? I have a Ultra 6 and want to fill it.

Thanks:.

darebee wrote:
Is there any hope WD will resolve this via firmware? I just bought 9 of these and would hate to have to return them all. I just found this thread. Or should I not bother and immediately return for the Seagate? I have a Ultra 6 and want to fill it.

Well, I've corresponded at some length with their customer support and they gave me no indication that they were planning to release new firmware to fix the problem... But I don't think that means that they never will; the drives are new and I'm sure that WDC would need a fair amount of time to determine whether an update is warranted and to test it.

And no one has even proved that all WD40EFRX drives have this problem. Both of my drives did, and I've seen a post in another thread from someone else whose drive did -- and I haven't seen anyone report that they own a WD40EFRX that doesn't have the problem -- but still, that is an extraordinarily small sample. So if you want to confirm that your drives have the problem before returning them, run Western Digital's wdidle3 program for DOS (http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113) or Christophe Bothamy's idle3ctl program for Linux (http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/). A bad drive will report that its Idle3 Timer is set to 0x50 (decimal 80).

If your Idle3 Timer values are set to 0x50, you can use those programs to disable the Idle3 Timer (which is presumably what a firmware update would do). WDC customer support told me that disabling the timer would invalidate my warranty, but maybe they'll give you a different answer if you ask them about it... And you can always re-enable the timer if you need to, leaving no indication, as far as I know -- except for the very low LoadCycleCount-to-PowerOnHours ratio -- that it was ever disabled.

But if you don't want to wait for a firmware update that might never come, and you don't want to manually disable the Idle3 Timer, then yeah, if I were in your position I would replace all those drives with Seagate ST4000VN000s.