Saving WD Caviar Green Hard Drives

Lately I've been trying to figure out a way to stop the ever-increasing Load_Cycle_Count of my WD Caviar Green hard drives. The count is the number of times the hard drive head parks and it's said that the design limit is 300,000 while my drives are getting 1/4 of that. The Green drive saves energy aggressively by parking its head after 8 seconds of idle time. However, the operating system (especially Linux) writes data into the drive every tens of seconds, so the drive constantly parks its head only to spin up shortly after, with annoying clicking noise all the time. This short park-spin cycle probably wastes more energy while shortening the drive's life.

It turns out that Western Digital admits the problem and provides a utility program called wdidle3.exe to change the idle time of 8 seconds up to 300 seconds. Although WD's website mentions only certain drive models can be used with the program, there has been reported successes with other models. Since this is a DOS program and I don't have any floppy drive or disks anymore, the only feasible way is to make a bootable USB key with DOS.

Create a bootable USB key

There are quite a few ways to create a bootable USB key and the easiest is with HP bootable media.exe as clearly explained by this lowFPS webpage. Following the steps, I made a 4GB USB key bootable. The drive seemed to be empty but "dir /a" command revealed hidden system files. Then I copied wdidle3.exe on to the USB key.

Boot from USB key

It shouldn't be a problem for later PCs to boot from a USB drive. I rebooted my PC and got into BIOS to change the boot order with the USB drive on top. With another reboot, the once familiar DOS prompt appeared. Then I ran "wdidle3 /s300" to change the idle time to 300 seconds (5 minutes) and verified the change with "wdidle3 /r".

Check Load_Cycle_Count

My PC runs Ubuntu and hard drive status can be checked with "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda". After two-day's usage, the Load_Cycle_Count only bumped up by 1 due to the fact that I put the PC into sleep at night.

Other sources

Synology uses WD Green for its NAS products and provides similar information.