WD20EARS 8second parking?

KelDG

KelDG

KelDG

Associate
Joined
7 Dec 2009
Posts
759
Did a quick google on this, should I be worried?

From what I have ready these drive park after 8 seonds of inactivity, this is supposed to increase wear on the drive massivley compared to a longer power down time of most other drives (some people report 30,000 of these cycles in a couple of months, and most drives are rated at 300,000 cycles)

There is a program by WD called widdle.exe that can change the timeout or disable it for these drives, but some posts are saying that the EARS drives are not supported.

Again, I dont know if this is true, just what I have read.

Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
other thing that concerned me after buying the 1tb version was there not suitable for use in a raid set up.

I am using one of these (1tb) in a external HD caddy-USB for media use.

Certainly a fast drive, just dont understand this 'parked head' set up.
 
I did a lot of research into this and came to the conclusion - the parking issue isn't a problem and the not suitable for RAID issue is basically a marketing ploy to push their enterprise drives. Again, loads of people use the green drives in raid with absolutely no issues.
 
Thanks for the replys, and cheers for the link survayer I had a good read of it, my search skills are not up to the job it seems i only searched for threads with WD20EARS in them.
 
I have four WD20EARS drives, ran wdidle3 in DOS to disable it on all my WD drives, they are controlled using power saving features in my NAS anyway, so if they are running then they are being used and the heads don't need to park.

But each to their own!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom