Critical Design Flaw Found in WD Caviar Green HDDs

[Picard]

It has come to our attention that Western Digital's Caviar Green HDDs suffer from a critical design flaw caused by an aggressive power-saving feature. Western Digital has developed a new technology called Intellipark (aka Idle 3 mode) and it is designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the HDD's heads in a park position and turning off unnecessary electronics after 8 seconds of inactivity.

According to an in-house investigation and user reports', some software and operating systems are incompatible with the Intellipark feature causing endless head parking movement as the HDD continuously goes in/out of idle mode. This abnormal behavior creates stress on the HDD and that could lead to the following issues:

• Loud clunking/clicking/buzzing noises every few seconds.
• Artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles in S.M.A.R.T.
• Possibly shortens life-time of the HDD.
• Possibly reduces performance of the HDD.

Western Digital posted a knowledge base article, where it claims that "The number of systems using such applications and utilities is limited", a statement which we believe is false and inaccurate. Sending an HDD to idle mode only after 8 seconds of activity is abnormal behavior, which much software doesn't like as they are constantly writing and reading data to/from the HDD.

According to Western Digital, the following models are affected: WD20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS and WD7501AYPS.

Western Digital has released a DOS-based utility to modify the behavior of the HDD to wait longer before invoking idle mode. However, since most of their latest HDDs still ship with the default setting of 8 seconds, we strongly recommend users with affected HDDs to use the utility and monitor S.M.A.R.T data immediately.

How to Adjust Intellipark's Timer
1. Download the WDIDLE3 ISO image and burn it to a CD/DVD.
2. Ensure that your SATA controller is set to IDE mode from the BIOS.
3. Boot from the CD/DVD, it should take you into DOS.
4. In DOS prompt, type: "wdidle3 /S300" to change the default timer from 8 seconds to 300 seconds (5 minutes).
5. In DOS prompt, type: "wdidle3 /R" to verify the results.

We appreciate Western Digital's efforts to conserve energy and protect the environment, but the 8-second-overkill Intellipark feature could lead to opposite results as more HDDs will be produced to replace defective ones. We sent an email to Western Digital with a link to this article asking for a comment on this matter. We will update this story as soon when we hear back from them.

Update #1: Daniel Mauerhofer, Head of EMEA PR in Western Digital has commented on this article. "This issue is far from critical, does not impair normal functionality or place data at risk, can be mitigated with a utility for the small percentage of systems affected, and is a well understood industry standard."

Update #2: A user on Western Digital's forum claims that his Caviar Black HDD is affected as well. "WD2001FASS parks heads after 12.8 seconds. It will eventually kill itself doing this. I was getting around 1400 Load Cycle Count a day due it parking and waking up constantly."

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-crit...reen-hdds.html

[voodoo_]

Woohoo, WD5000AACS nije ugrožen! \o/

[nexexcalibur]

Woohoo, WD6400AAKS nije ugrožen! \o/

[Milos_SD]

Imam WD10EADS koji je pomenut u postu. I "Load/Unload Cycle Count" mi je 133. U programi pise sledece:
Normalized: 200
Worst: 200
Treshhold: 0
Value: 133

E sada, kada bih znao sta to znaci, bilo bi super. Nije valjda da je samo 133 puta imao Load/Unload Cycle? Imam disk godinu dana mozda, a kako sam procitao na netu, ljudima je to i nekoliko hiljada sa tolikom staroscu hard diska.

[Nutsbre@ker]

Woohoo, jos jedan korisnik WD6400AAKS kome je sada lakse. A taman sam se preznojio jer imam toliko ''strucne'' literature na njemu.

[water wizard]

WDC WD10EARS
Power Cycle Count 0x0000000000DC OK 100
Load Cycle Count 0x0000000015CB OK 199


WDC WD10EADS
Power Cycle Count 0x0000000002E3 OK 100

Load Cycle Count 0x0000000002FB OK 200

Ne izgleda mi zabrinjavajuće

[Doomche]

nexexcalibur kaže:

Woohoo, WD6400AAKS nije ugrožen! \o/

Nutsbre@ker kaže:

Woohoo, jos jedan korisnik WD6400AAKS kome je sada lakse. A taman sam se preznojio jer imam toliko ''strucne'' literature na njemu.

Woohoo, nijedan od vas dvojice u stvari nema WD Green disk koji je pomenut u naslovu teme .

[Fibonacci]

Da, koliko se ja secam, AAKS je plavi . . .

[Levčanin]

Zato se ja lepo ne družim sa WD green diskovima više volim plavu boju...

[dbaja]

Levčanin kaže:

Zato se ja lepo ne družim sa WD green diskovima više volim plavu boju...

Ništa nisu bolji, veruj... Tek su crni tu-i-tamo kvalitetnije izrade.
Evo, meni je pre par dana crkao plavi scorpio 320Gb 2.5". A bio je star tek godinu i po. A još je veoma mažen i pažen. I to je u njemu nešto riknulo tako da neće da radi u lapu (tj. neće da pokrene Windows sa njega), a radi kada se nakači kao eksterni disk preko usb-a.
A i taj problem sa greenom, pitanje je uopšte koliko ih je crklo (ako je uopšte) zbog tih 8 sekundi po defaultu.

[orange47]

ja sam tek sad cuo za ovo. imam negde oko 160000 tih load-unload ciklusa. jel isti problem i pod Windows-ima?

[player1]

Mislim da je i WD Scorpio Blue takodje ugrozen ovime: wd7500bpvt

Ja sam posle 2 meseca koriscenje imao HDD sa preko 90.000 load/unload cikljusa.
Kada je laptop veoma malo optrecen, svakih desetak sekundi se culo paljenje i gasenje diska.

Na kraju sam uzeo CrystalDiskInfo, i potpuno iskljucio taj feature (mada za ovo je neophono da autostartujem taj utility posle svakog boota wina).

[Stojadin]

Jel se o ovome radi? 10EADS ima 78000 dok AAKS samo 3000 a duplo je stariji.



Zadnjih mesec dana čujem neke čudne zvuke iz njega, zuji nekih 10tak sekundi pa prekine na neko vreme pa opet...

EDIT: Izgleda da postoji rešenje u vidu nekog apdejta, samo da prebacim neke bitne stvari pa ću da probam.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/...p/15731/page/2

EDIT2: Uspelo je. Vrednost se ne menja dok se pre menjala svakih 8s a i čudan zvuk je nestao.

Ovde imate butabilni .iso