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

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sub.mesa said:
Finally some words of wisdom!

The funny thing is that you guys are quarrelling over mostly firmware differences. Some might say: WD Green is bad because all that power saving crap is nonesense! While others might say that WD Reds are the only right choice for use with RAID arrays.

Of course, neither is true. Both are physically the same drives. WD just likes to annoy their customers by introducing two different products under the same product part number. Both Green and Red series come in different platter capacities. This leads to the Red getting better (lower) power consumption than the Green.

Some myths:
WD Green is not suitable for RAID (not suitable for low-quality RAID implementations, correct)
WD Green is not suitable for 24/7 (all drives are suitable for 24/7; all mechanical devices like nothing more than a static environment without any changes)
WD Green uses variable rpm called IntelliPower (no dude, it is static; dynamic rpm does not exist)
WD Green has high probability of failure (nonsense; it is physically the same as WD Red)
WD Green cannot be used in RAID arrays because it lacks TLER (only low-quality RAID implementations require TLER; 'proper' RAID likes WD Green just fine)
WD Green has that annoying headparking feature (true it is annoying; but 7200rpm drives also have it; it is not limited to green/5400rpm disks)
WD Green is slow (it is faster than many 7200rpm drives thanks to its high data density)
WD Green consumes even more power than WD Red (only if you do a false comparison between the 666GB platter version and 1000GB platter version)

As far as I know, the only differences between WD Green and WD Red:
- one year additional warranty (2 -> 3 years). Countries without warranty-protection by law will see an increase from 1 -> 3 years.
- Reds feature TLER=7 by default, while Greens have them locked at 120 seconds ('TLER disabled')
- Reds have headparking disabled while Greens require APM or wdidle to disable

Other than that, both drives are more than likely physically the same. Only the firmware and warranty is different. On the other hand, the 'RE' series more than likely is physically different, due to different specs on various mechanical components. Basically it is something between a consumer and enterprise drive with
Click to expand...

Solid post.

Is there actually any evidence (meaning data) that the head parking is even a real issue in terms of reliability? Its an interesting theory and all but until there is data behind it I don't think we can really draw any conclusions. My personal experience tells me that for storage its likely not much of an issue.
 
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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.
 
sub.mesa said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
spandexninja said:
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.
Click to expand...

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...-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731/page/4
 
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）
 
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