[Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
Igor Nikolic
i.nikolic at tudelft.nl
Wed Apr 16 19:50:23 UTC 2008
As a reply to myself at : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comments/431
WD got back to me with this reply :
---
Dear Igor,
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support.
The drives have a minimum life of 600K cycles. There is a utility that
you can run to alter to a max of 25 seconds, or disable the load/unload
cycles the drive performs. It is recommended to alter the load/unload
cycles rather than a complete disable.
Please see the attached file.
Sincerely,
Michelle D.
Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com
---
On their support site I found a program called wdidle3.exe.
The accompanying wdidle3..txt says :
---
WDIDLE3 Version 1.00 for DOS
DESCRIPTION
- DOS Level utility to setup or report the idle3 value.
FEATURES
- Scan for all drives. Non-WD Drives shall only show the model and
serial
numbers.
- Uses a Vendor Specific Command to set or get the idle3 timer.
- Timer can be set from 100 ms to 25.5 seconds, in 100ms increments.
USAGE
WDIDLE3 [/S[<Timer>]] [/D] [/R] [/?]
where:
/S[<Timer>] Set timer, units in 100 milliseconds (1 to 255). Default=80.
/D Disable timer.
/R Report current timer.
/? This help info.
DOS ERRORLEVEL
0 No error
1 Drive problem
254 Internal program error
255 Invalid command line argument
---
Since I do not have a floppy drive on this machine, and after a few
hours of unsuccessful fiddling with FreeDos booting from a USB drive, I
still have no idea if this helps.
But there is an interesting stuff in the text file. The default is 80,
so 8 seconds. That would mean that the drive is sent to park every 8
seconds? The other weird thing is that the maximum is 25 seconds. That
would be worse then the number of parks right now. Or am I reading this
wrong ?
Anyway, I hope somebody finds this info useful. If not, sorry for
spamming...
Igor
--
High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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