When a Green drive is not Green, especially

Placing a new 2T --
WD Green 2TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5-inch, ***SATA 6 Gb/s,
IntelliPower, 64MB Cache WD20EZRX

Couple of things surfaced when looking over the drive (after its
initial sale price)....

What makes it Green? For WD, apparently, an 8-second
[default/shipped] timeout to shutting the drive down and parking its
head. What's that mean? A high, hm "intelli-"count reported back
through various safety and software monitoring drive-state counts;-
premature failure and wear, in a worst-case scenario.

About as laughable, I'd imagine, as some evidence of a lawsuit against
WD that effected [revised] manufacturing of drives with "premature
timeouts."

What's that mean to me? Nothing, nada, squat. My drive, when I ran
the WD-written (DOS) diagnostics reported back a default condition of
8 seconds*...

*// Western Digital Corporation
// 20511 Lake Forest Dr.
// Lake Forest, CA 92630
// 1-800-275-4932
WDIDLE3 Version 1.05 for DOS
DESCRIPTION- DOS Level utility to setup or report the idle3 value.
FEATURES- Scan for all drives. Non-WD Drives shall only show the model
and serial numbers.
- Uses a Vendor Specific Command to set or get the idle3 timer.
- Timer can be set from 8 to 25.5 seconds on older drives.
**- Timer can be set from 8 to 300 seconds on newer drives.

So, I changed it to the max allowable, 300 seconds**;- I'm also in the
process of aiming the OS virtual memory file at a token logical
partition to effect a Black Drive;- it'll never time out, in a
circular fashion, with Microsoft things incessantly being done on that
token partition. Might be a tad slower than Black-Fast, I guess, but
for practical intents it should run like a black drive (that's left on
24/7).

Only screw-up, I managed, so far is there's some pins, non-jumpered
and defaulted to, presumably, SATA 3 Gb/s, rather than ***SATA 6 Gb/s
the drive is advertised/produced for in truth. It's a relatively old
machine, mine is, with 2 SATA ports on the MB and 2 on a SATA PCI card
-- still, ought to be worth a shot, jumpering it for 6G/s. General
principles. Nothing bad can happen, so it's a 'nothing ventured
nothing gained' thing. (I deliberately leave my optical DVD
disconnected, as it's seldom used or less than should it be easier/
advantageous simply to prop-up another storage drive for a quick
connect and transfer of material data;- It's taking hours and hours,
though fast, that way, as it is now, to migrate near a terabyte off an
old 800G drive.)

On 3/3/15 6:55 PM, Flasherly wrote:
What makes it Green? For WD, apparently, an 8-second
[default/shipped] timeout to shutting the drive down and parking its
head. What's that mean? A high, hm "intelli-"count reported back
through various safety and software monitoring drive-state counts;-
premature failure and wear, in a worst-case scenario.

Buyers were told to disable that feature so as not to kill the hard disk.

On Tue, 03 Mar 2015 21:19:26 +0800, "Mr. Man-wai Chang"
wrote:

Buyers were told to disable that feature so as not to kill the hard disk.

Either that or not to disable;- the 300 seconds timeout may be better
than if to entirely disable, e.g.- the /D switch in the command line.

On 4/3/15 11:13 AM, Flasherly wrote:
Either that or not to disable;- the 300 seconds timeout may be better
than if to entirely disable, e.g.- the /D switch in the command line.

Does its firmware reject a timeout value that's too small?
I wonder whether this is the problem...

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On Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:07:35 +0800, "Mr. Man-wai Chang"
wrote:


Does its firmware reject a timeout value that's too small?
I wonder whether this is the problem...

No. Firmware accepts the utility -- WDIDLE3 Version 1.05 for DOS --
as it should. Nothing more or less.

I put in 300 seconds, /S300, after reading (what I could *out of*)
related searches/posts. I tend personally to favor a HDD running
24/7, though, never timing out for effectively a black drive, then.

Why didn't I just use the /D parameter for [Dis]able...guess I read
something that, perhaps, advanced /S300 for the better solution.

Also - did catch my eye that WD faced a lawsuit from interests that
apparently didn't believe a drive manufacturer should 'mandatory be
forcing [on firmware] drive time-outs.' (People are closely watching
drive models and their revisions;- interesting, that Western Digital
reacted by taking some pains to erase such distinctions and
identifying marks on given drives for discerning manufacturer
changes.)

Anyway, Man-wai, it's basically a popular drive "series," or one with
at least an established trackrecord as a big-volume sales item. Also
it's sitting aside a 2T Black Seagate (using a SDD for the OS,
everything else - they're both 'mass storage' drives);- except for
this particular WD Green, flavored with a S/300sec, 6 minute time-out,
an effect which shouldn't ever occur, as I mentioned I did add to it a
token (3G) logical partition for pointing where the OS's virtual
memory swap file will reside. They should coexist operationally well
together -- no delays, timeouts, anomalies (both also being extensions
from a 3rd-party PCI-slotted drive controller).

Only problem, at least I'm attempting to avoid, is not to fail at
maintaining a continued track record I've had with long-lived HDD
selections/purchases...5- to 10-year lifespans without any notable,
particularly, catastrophic interventions. (Praised be duck entrails
and augers the gods most favor!)

(Well, I did get screwed locally on a local store promotion sales
window, once, and only once -- for a few short hours for HDDs
basically priced half off;- both so-called "sales drives," I
purchased, Western Digital models, quit and broke as if coded into
their firmware for a breakdown within 1 year and a few days after
Western Digital's warrantee limitations expired. Heh - lesson
learned: no more God Damned dog&pony, chainstore come-on sales plots
with drive manufacturers, at least for me!)