WD Red drives park their heads like WD Green drives?

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.