voochi Wrote:Thanks for the info, I will read up on it some more and if it seems safe for my particular drives I will try to change the head-parking to maybe 5 minutes.
They're storage drives (not OS) so Windows puts them to sleep anyway after a period of inactivity. Maybe that's why my load cycles arent crazy high.
Quote:Unfortunately The WDIdle Utility is no longer available from Western Digital. The problem here is that WDidle is a tool which was developed for older drives but still works on some new drives. It was not designed for this and so the outcome can be unpredictable, hence we do not support it. It can be found throughout the Internet but is no longer distributed by WD. By using WDIdle your drive's firmware is altered and the warranty will be voided. The reason why this feature (IntelliPark) was created and placed on the drives, was in order to lower power consumption in order to be more eco-friendly. The unit will not encounter a sudden death due to this featureSource
Quote:The reason for the clicking is due to the drive parking its heads on a ramp. We do this not as much for power consumption but for purposes of getting the heads in a position where they are less likely to be damaged during an impact.Source
All disk drive makers think pretty much the same way on this topic. Power management is a secondary benefit.
As for early disk failure due to continuous unloading on the ramp, We have studied the result of this function and understand that there is no wear on the actuator and minimal wear on the ramp itself. However, any wear is far outweighed by the reduction of drive failures due to head disk impact when the heads are left flying over the media.
Excessive Shock damage causes the heads to slap into the disk, if the heads are not up the ramp, which is usually catastrophic. If the head is on the ramp (as we suggest) and the system/drive receives a shock then no damage can happen to the head or media.
Regarding the 600,000 Load_Cycle_Count:
“The 600,000 is the typical spec of most drive ramps. We actually test to 1,000,000 load/unloads over various temp ranges and conditions. It is possible for the drive to exceed 600K in a year (however unlikely) if you use the drive nonstop, 24 hours a day and access the drive every 40 seconds continuously for that whole year. Now that scenario is not only unrealistic but it is so far beyond the design spec of the drive its not funny. The reality is a drive typically unloads 40 times an hour if the drive (not the system) is under constant use. Based on a typical 8 hours of drive use per day that’s 336 unloads per day. If you do that every day for a year that’s 122,640 unloads per year. That means you will reach the spec of 600K in 4.89 years.
We track Load/unload values in SMART. We do not have a threshold for load/unload however. Which means we do not raise any warnings to the system for load/unload. There are SMART values of much higher significance that we do track and have a warning threshold for.”
And he concluded:
So, even if you hit 600,000 Load_Cycles, SMART won’t start to nag or warn.
Fujitsu says their drives are tested to 1,000,000 Load_Cycles, and even then, Ramp failures are super-rare.
Part of the email included attachments labeled “Fujitsu Property & Confidential”, so I guessing they went a little above and beyond to give me some info on it.
In summary, what it sounds like, even though the clicking is annoying, an excessive Load_Cycle_Count may not be something to worry about.
solidsatras Wrote:Unfortunately The WDIdle Utility is no longer available from Western Digital. The problem here is that WDidle is a tool which was developed for older drives but still works on some new drives. It was not designed for this and so the outcome can be unpredictable, hence we do not support it. It can be found throughout the Internet but is no longer distributed by WD. By using WDIdle your drive's firmware is altered and the warranty will be voided. The reason why this feature (IntelliPark) was created and placed on the drives, was in order to lower power consumption in order to be more eco-friendly. The unit will not encounter a sudden death due to this feature
