WD Red drives park their heads like WD Green drives?

I have had a couple of email exchanges with WD on this, the latest being today. I asked them 3 questions and have posted their responses below. Just as a reminder, my issue is a brand new WD30EFRX from Amazon that out of the box has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. When installed in my Ultra 4 it climbed to 1200 LCC's in the 1st 24 hours.

Questions to WD Technical Support and their replies below
1. Is there something wrong with this drive? At the current rate of head parking this drive will reach a count of somewhere in the 2-3 million cycles before the 3 year warranty period is reached. If WD really believes that the drives can survive this many parking cycles why do you only list 600,000 in your specification? Since this will be 4-5 times the specified value it does appear something is wrong with the drive.
(WD Response) Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digital’s WD Red, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles.
They also stated in another email that "To date, we have had no reported hard drive failures due to cycle and load times with any of our drives."

2. Should the Idle3 timer have been set to 8 seconds when I received it? I have seen several other postings and test data/reviews on the internet where people state when they received their WD30EFRX the Idle3 timer was disabled?
(WD Response) - They did not answer this question

3. Is there something I can do to reduce the LCC concern and increase the life of this drive if I am still concerned about it? I have seen several posts where people claim that using the WDIDLE3 tool works OK, but it is not listed as a drive for this tool on the WD web site. Is this tool OK to use or is there something else that can be done to change this operation?
(WD Response) - The WDIddle3 utility has not been designed for this particular product. However, we've seen cases where customers have used the tool with this internal drive and managed to set Idle3 to max time which effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature. Please also find the link for the WDiddle3 utility which should allow you to set the WDiddle 3 for your needs.

http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... 13&lang=en
Note that this is version 1_05. I have seen references to a version 2.0...., but have never been able to find a copy of it. The link they sent me is for version 1_05 and it worked fine for me.

I have used the WDIDDLE3 (version 1_05) tool to set the Idle3 timer on my WD30EFRX to 300 seconds and so far I have only had a couple of LCC increases in a few days. Although this is a pain to deal with, I still believe this is a good drive for the NAS application and have another drive on order. It will be interesting to see if it also has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds when I receive it. If it does I will also change it to 300 seconds. I also plan to submit a review on Amazon for this drive documenting the issue there so that others might be made aware of this before they order.

I plan to let them close the ticket and just plan to use WDIDDLE3 on any future drives when needed.

I just received my 2nd WD30EFRX from Amazon yesterday and it also came from the factory with the Idle3 timer set for 8 seconds. I used the Wdidle3 tool and set the timer to 300 seconds. I also used the WD Diagnostics Utility to perform an extensive test on the drive and it passed all tests. I plan to put it into my Ultra 4 later today. Both of the drives that I have received with the timer set for 8 seconds were WD part number: WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. I have seem some indications on the web that this 8 seconds may be unique to drives with the 68EUZN0 extension. Not sure how ever since most people do not post the full part number. My 1st WD30EFRX has been running in my Ultra 4 for 1 week now after I set the timer to 300 seconds. I have only had 2 LCC increases since that time and 1 was due to a power cycle. Seems to be working great and running cool/quite.

I had to RMA one of my WD Red's and the exchange was a 68EUZN0. The LCC seem to be increasing pretty fast, at least compared to my previous versions 68AX9N0 where the LCC pretty much stay the same all the time as long as the NAS is running.

Anyway, I ran WDIDLE3 on it and to my surprise it was reported as disabled. I set up a timer and disabled it again just to make sure it "refreshes" if anything. Yet the LCC's still rise up quite a bit, but not as fast as some people were reporting of several hundred a day. But it does increase about 20-50 per day. My 68AX9N0 Red's stay the same during this time

Suggestions?

20-50 per day is not a problem in itself -- at that rate the drive won't reach its maximum rated LCC count until sometime in the second half of this century -- but it is curious that this drive's behavior is different from that of the other drives in your system. I might have suspected that the LCC increases were due to OS-initiated disk spindown (Frontview System:Power:Enable Disk Spindown), but if that were the case, I would also have expected all drives to be affected equally.

Odd.

Did you power-cycle the NAS -- not just reboot it -- after you disabled the Idle3 timer using WDIDLE3?

Like I mentioned the timer was disabled by default when I ran WDIDLE3 to check. I am running an extended SMART test now again on all 3 drives.

I have 2 Red's version 68AX9N0 which I had for about a year now and this new replacement which is a 68EUZN0. Since the LCC was increasing on this one but not on my original 2 RED's (68AX9N0), I thought the timer was enabled. I was surprised when I found out it is disabled instead. However, yes as I mentioned the 68EUZN0 LCC's are increasing while the 68AX9N0 drives LCC stays the same.

My LCC right now is 150 on the 68EUZN0 (I had it for 3 days), while the LCC on my original 68AX9N0 which are about 1 year old is 350.

I am using these in a Synology DS413j

Maybe you should also try the newer tool what WDC provided instead of wdidle3?

Which one is that and what does it do

Messerschmitt wrote:
Which one is that and what does it do

http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en

It is their supported tool for changing the head parking threshold. wdidle is quite old.

Does this only change the parking threshold? I thought WDIDLE3 disables it to begin with... It also mentions that you should do a backup, and it seems it's not a DOS program?

WDIDLE3 is an old program, and WDC says it isn't compatible with all their drives. The new program is what they want you to use, and they've gone to the trouble to provide windows, mac, and linux versions.

I don't know why you'd want a DOS program, but feel free to use whatever. HDPARM also apparently can be used.