Western Digital drives and the head parking conspiracy

[protocol7]

There's a lot of chatter online about the aggressive head-parking that WD's low-power drives tend to use. I noticed it myself when I replaced the Toshiba drive in my MacBook with a nice new shiny Scorpio Blue. After cloning my old drive across and booting into it, an hour or so later the Load Cycle Count was at over 140. By comparison the LCC on my PC's system drive (a WD Black) is 21 after 8093 hours.

One fix for OS X is to use hdapm to override the drive's setting. It seems to work, but I'd prefer something that works on the hardware level. Especially as this parking issue probably also affects bootcamp.

There is a WD tool in circulation that allows you to alter the default park time (8 seconds in my case). However it's a dos app. I tried a bunch of different boot disks and finally found that FreeDOS was able to function properly on an Intel Mac. So here's a prebuilt bootable ISO that will allow you to see the current setting on your WD drive and alter it. All the info came from here.

Once you've burned the ISO, boot holding down C. When the disc loads (blue screen) hit enter at the boot prompt. You can now run wdidle3:

wdidle3 /R shows you the current setting for your drive

wdidle3 /D disables the parking on older drives. on newer drives (like mine) it sets it to 62 minutes

wdidle3 /S sets the parking time in seconds (/S300 for example)

 

[Gorgonops]

I know it's infantile to say this, but... I'm amused at how the name of that command is one letter transposition away from "widdle".

"Oh, a good 'widdle' will fix your hard disk problems..."

 

[~Coxy]

There is another tool called wdtler which is also handy for these green drives, but unfortunately it only works with slightly older models of disk.

 

[protocol7]

I'd heard of the TLER tool. From what I could gather it's mostly needed in RAID setups. As it could be useful, here's a new iso that adds WDTLER and a basic list of commands for both programs. The hdaccess program that comes with wdtler doesn't seem to run on my MacBook, but I'm not sure now if it's actually needed.

I also added a reboot option for those of us who can't type CTRL-ALT-DEL.