WD Red drives park their heads like WD Green drives?

vandermerwe wrote:
coreyinoz and ocso One of you at least as filed a case with WD, ocso have you done so?

Hi vandermerwe,

not yet, but I am going to contact with WD.

(info about LCC count after 48 hours: 4820)

vandermerwe wrote:
coreyinoz and ocso One of you at least as filed a case with WD, ocso have you done so?

Completely agree - and yes I did contact WD, before I even took matters into my own hands here. I'm sad to report that in this period, Netgear contacted me back 3 times within 48 hours while WD has not yet contacted me back at all. WD's support site says that their service goal is 24 hours... and here we are, over a week later.

So I finally made my DOS boot stick, grabbed WDIDLE and put it in my desktop. The WD Red was set for (wait for it) 8 Seconds!! I couldn't believe it.

I measured the LCC, disabled it straight out, and will report back on findings in a couple of days. After reading Anand's runup, which includes a screenshot showing default of disable for a WD Red, I was not expecting this.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/western-digital-red-review-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium/2

As I mentioned, this is a brand new drive - factory sealed, production date of Oct, 2013. Thanks for nothing WD.

Aw craps! I just ordered two of these today from amazon. Now I read this thread with concern. I ordered these drives because my Seagate crappy drives have plagued my Pro 6 for some time now and one has finally given up, the oter is on its way out. I vouched to never buy a Seagate drive again! So I read the HCL and chose the WD30EFRX.

Too late now..... I cant stop the order.

So, I will get the drives in a few days. In readiness can you tell me more about this WDIDLE3 tool you mention. Where do I get it? Is there any documentation about it or links etc.
I will run the tests and report back with the detail when I get home (be a week as I am working overseas).

BTW my Seagates are ST31500341AS 1.5TB.....with the damn write-cache problem. I ended up writing a script to auto turn off the write-cache at boot. But these drives have had constant realloation sector count increases since I got them. I got no help from their support here in the UK.

Also saw this thread viewtopic.php?f=82&t=64315

Scouser
Why not return the drives to amazon straight away?
The seagate NAS drives seem ok, so far. I haven't seen any bad reports and I can confirm the 4tb version of the seagate NAS drive runs well with no lcc issues.

Scouser wrote:
Aw craps! I just ordered two of these today from amazon. Now I read this thread with concern.

Before you panic - WDIDLE3 isn't a huge amount of work - just annoying to have to do it at all on a drive marketed as NAS specific. There are ways to do this in the NAS itself, but I found it far easier to shut down the NAS - pop the drive into my desktop, run WDIDLE3 and then put the drive back. Took no more than 5 minutes.

Create a bootable USB DOS key with Rufus: http://rufus.akeo.ie/

Get a copy of WDIDLE3 and put it on your USB stick.

You can get version 1.0.5 from WD direct here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113
You can get 2.0.0.1 from a user on the QNAP forums who says that WD sent it to him as part of a service ticket: http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=182&t=83577&p=383135&sid=1bcbda0761b0855314902b569c34974a#p382825

I'm not clear on the changelog between 1.05 and 2.0.0.1.

At the DOS prompt run WDIDLE3 /R to see the current drive setting, then WDIDLE3 /D to disable the timer.

Pop it back in the NAS and you're good.

So far so good for me - LCC has grown 3 since reboot 9 hours ago - putting me on track for less than 10/day - a lot less than 1K+ per day up until now.

Thanks coreyinoz. Great writeup. I guess I dont care too much to have to disable the LLC timer but its disappointing for a NAS class drive.
Ideally, I would like to see if this problem occurs on these new drives but the time it takes to rebuild them makes it it unlikely....there are two drives to replace so that's time x 2.
I think I will just go ahead and /D the drives before I use them. Anyway, I will let you know how I go.

vandermerwe, this is not an option. First off the drives had already been shipped by the time I added my comment so too late to cancel the order. Secondly, as I said I am working overseas. Actually wont be back in the UK, where the server is until 4th Dec. So I cant ship them back and get something else in replacement in time for Xmas at least not in the UK.....and I cant afford for my server to be down another drive until next year. I am depending on a) these are good drives, b) that they work as advertised and c) that they are supported by Netgear and d) that I swore to myself that I would never get a Seagate drive again.
I understand that by twidleing /D I may break warranty but I have no option....and I can always re-twiddle /D back later....assuming the drives dont crash and burn altogether.

Anyway, glad I found this thread. Thanks again guys.

I checked my drive with wdidle3 /R, and idle timer was set for 8 seconds! I was very disappointed and I disabled with the /D parameter. :oops:
The current LCC count is 28367 and it stopped growing. (28367 head parking after 144 hours!!!)

Looking around for a Linux alternative to WDIDLE3.exe I found this http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/
I will give it a try when when I get home. Anyone else care to try it?

Scouser wrote:
Looking around for a Linux alternative to WDIDLE3.exe I found this http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ I will give it a try when when I get home. Anyone else care to try it?

I've seen a thread on another NAS forum where people have used that tool. In the end, I felt it was easier (and more proven) to pop the WD into my desktop and boot to DOS with WD's own tool. Up to you...