Please set the record straight. Does WD green drives have head parking ?

[sub.mesa]

Well, there is the quite ubiquitous specification on load cycles of 300.000. If you run drives with aggressive head-parking in a 24/7 environment, it is very easy to each this specification in under a year of regular use. The operating system continues to make small writes due to logs and night-time scripts that run.

Head-parking is not a bad thing. But I cannot understand why they didn't choose for a much more conservative setting of 60-120 seconds. In my opinion, 120 seconds would be a good setting where head-parking occurs only after 2 minutes of inactivity. Any less, and it could occur very frequently during light usage.

I suspect the head-parking is basically a way to reduce power-consumption required to overcome the forces the permanent magnet exhibits, which will push the actuator to a parked position upon loss of power automatically. This is just speculation on my part, by the way. But generally such power-saving techniques are developed in the areas that need it the most: mobile laptop devices where idle power consumption is paramount. Once such techniques are developed, they generally flow to other markets like the 3,5" green. I don't recall when head-parking was first utilized on 3,5" drives, but it would not surprise me if they started using head-parking on the 'green' family of 5400rpm harddrives, oriented at lower power consumption. But even the 7200rpm Seagate 7200.14 and other drives utilize head-parking.

One thing to say in favor of head-parking is that - during the time the head is parked in a safe position - vibrations and G-shocks will have a lesser probability of affecting the surface medium, as in a head-crash. A head-crash occurs when the actuator head touches the physical medium and scrapes it along. However, it should be noted that harddrives use landing zones on the surface medium at intermittent spots throughout the platter medium, to allow for the head to rest at these positions when not utilised. A head-crash there would probably lead to less damage than without these zones. But either way; a head-crash is an extremely dangerous occurrence.

[assassin24]

Originally Posted by sub.mesa

Well, there is the quite ubiquitous specification on load cycles of 300.000. If you run drives with aggressive head-parking in a 24/7 environment, it is very easy to each this specification in under a year of regular use. The operating system continues to make small writes due to logs and night-time scripts that run.

Head-parking is not a bad thing. But I cannot understand why they didn't choose for a much more conservative setting of 60-120 seconds. In my opinion, 120 seconds would be a good setting where head-parking occurs only after 2 minutes of inactivity. Any less, and it could occur very frequently during light usage.

I suspect the head-parking is basically a way to reduce power-consumption required to overcome the forces the permanent magnet exhibits, which will push the actuator to a parked position upon loss of power automatically. This is just speculation on my part, by the way. But generally such power-saving techniques are developed in the areas that need it the most: mobile laptop devices where idle power consumption is paramount. Once such techniques are developed, they generally flow to other markets like the 3,5" green. I don't recall when head-parking was first utilized on 3,5" drives, but it would not surprise me if they started using head-parking on the 'green' family of 5400rpm harddrives, oriented at lower power consumption. But even the 7200rpm Seagate 7200.14 and other drives utilize head-parking.

One thing to say in favor of head-parking is that - during the time the head is parked in a safe position - vibrations and G-shocks will have a lesser probability of affecting the surface medium, as in a head-crash. A head-crash occurs when the actuator head touches the physical medium and scrapes it along. However, it should be noted that harddrives use landing zones on the surface medium at intermittent spots throughout the platter medium, to allow for the head to rest at these positions when not utilised. A head-crash there would probably lead to less damage than without these zones. But either way; a head-crash is an extremely dangerous occurrence.

Yes, I have read that most drives have head parking. Which is interesting because when people want to say something bad about the green or 5400RPM drives they usually rail on head parking.

Interestingly enough these same people are using drives (unbeknownst to them) that also have head parking.

Since I use a SSD for my OS and only use hard drives for storage I am not at all concerned about this issue either way. I think there are much more important issues to reliability (production run, what facility they were built in, handling during transit, firmware, internal components, etc) since they all use basically the same parts.

Just my opinion of course.

[sub.mesa]

No argument from me there.

[bononos]

Originally Posted by spandexninja

My WD Scorpio Blue (2.5" 1TB) parks every 8 seconds and WD wdidle3 doesn't support the Scorpio Blue

I have to turn the APM to maximum performance in CrystalDiskInfo to stop it from constantly parking.

I remembered coming across in discussions about wdidle3 support for different drive models. I think the consensus was that it did or that even if it wasn't explicitly stated, it did work for many common models.

The problem is that the utility only works in DOS so you had to switch to IDE from AHCI to run the utility. Then there was a bug with 1.03. And finally disabling all timing using /d didn't work (or maybe only with particular GP models) and the best method to delay head parking was setting it to 5mins (the max using wdidle3).

The thread below has many references to other links on the subject.
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-...p/15731/page/4

[ueda]

There is a utility for AHCI mode.
“WDIDLE3 for Windows”（http://ux.getuploader.com/liliumrubellum/） enable you to change the idle timer setting of WD Green SATA Drives.
It runs on Windows XP or later(not need dos boot, need only cmd.exe), and is compatible with Windows standard AHCI driver, Intel Rapid Storage technology driver, Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver(need adding /C) and AMD AHCI driver.
It can issue commands to only one drive.（Original wdidle3 always issues commands to all drives.）
If you have changed timer setting, you must shutdown PC once.（not reboot, need power off）