Western Digital green vs black caviar [solved]

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

In advance, I confess that I have not read wd's web site and I am probably not going to...

I recently bought a wd green caviar disk and noticed that it has something called "intellipark" or something that parks the reader after 8 minutes of idle and then freezes for 30 seconds (actually much longer) before it wakes up (on reactivate) and has a very short lifetime in Linux if I understand everything correctly. It is very annoying, since everything freezes from time to time, and I just want to buy a new disk.

Is this correct, and if so, is there a fix? Are there any other hdds I should avoid in Linux? Does black caviar have the same problem? Should I avoid western digital entirely?

I read that black caviar is performance focused, but I do not want to buy another disk without asking the pro's :-)

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 11:20 pm Post subject:

google "wd disable intellipark" there are hints on how to disable it

I don't know if the black series has that, but I doubt it, as they are more for serious use versus power savings.
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UM780, 6.14 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Gusar · Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 11:39 pm Post subject:

No idea if this intellipark thing has a fix, I went with a caviar blue instead because of it. No problems with it, I'm very happy with the purchase. Caviar black is supposedly the speed demon, but I didn't care about that, I'm used to slow laptop disks, so even the cheaper blue is helluva fast for me.

All in all, try to disable intellipark if you can, otherwise go for blue or black.

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

Thanks and thanks!

I will try this wdidle thing which can be found here http://www.maxishine.com.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=12776

Just need to backup some stuff... will post the result here!

[edit] I will try the advanced format jumper setting first even though I read it might mess things up even more

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

forget the jumper

use a freedos usb boot disk with wdidle and set the timer to max

that's what I did anyway

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

Thanks frost!

Mine is a WD20EARS-00J2GB0, which wdidle do not support according to WD web site. Any thoughts?

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

Yes, it doesn't support my drive either, but in the wdc forum community.wdc.com or whatever it was stated that it's supported anyway, and so I just tried it and it worked for me :lol:

Use at your own risk, make sure to use the latest version, and hope that if it's really not supported the wdidle program will be smart enough not to break anything...

best of luck ...

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

Thanks!

I will let you know =)

d2_racing · Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2011 6:49 pm Post subject:

The black caviar seems to be the best hdd that WD can offer in term of performance vs cost.

I heard a lot of bad stuff about the Green serie, so if I have to buy a WD tomorrow, I'm gonna pay the extra $ to have a WD Black serie for sure.

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

OK,
I did the wdidle3.exe /d to disable the intellipark, but it said "set to 62 minutes" instead of disabled. It is better than 8 seconds...

The jumper stuff was to use 4k sectors (I think) so I left that untouched.

After restoring my backups I will monitor the load cycles and see if it helped. I will probably notice if it hangs before that :-)

I will report the result here once done

Zebbeman · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 69

OK, it seems like it helped =)

Still ticking, but slower than before:

~ # date
Sat Jan 15 00:31:41 CET 2011
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 194 194 000 Old_age Always - 19764

~ # date
Fri Jan 21 15:13:50 CET 2011
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 194 194 000 Old_age Always - 19781

The disk is responsive as well, no more waiting...

Thanks guys!