It has been recently discovered that Western Digital's line of Caviar Green hard disk drives, one of the company's most popular HDD ranges, is suffering from a critical design flaw which can cause the drives to behave abnormally, and could even lead to performance losses and a shorter HDD lifespan.
The design flaw seems to be caused by a power saving feature called Intellipark (aka Idle 3 mode), which has a much too aggressive setting.
Intellipark is designed to reduce the power consumption of the HDD by positioning the drive's head in a parked position and turning off some unnecessary electronics after a period of inactivity.
In the case of the Caviar Green
HDD, this time interval is set at just 8 seconds, which makes it incompatible with a series of software applications and operating systems.
As a result, the Intellipark feature causes endless head parking movement as the HDD continuously goes in/out of idle mode, according to the
NgoHQ publication.
This type of abnormal behavior can lead to loud clicking noises, a shorter drive lifespan as well as a loss in performance and an artificially increased number of load-unload cycles in the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring system.
Western Digital is well aware of this problem and has released a DOS-based utility which makes the drive wait longer before entering the Intellipark mode.
According to
Western Digital, the D20EADS, WD20EARS, WD15EADS, WD15EARS, WD10EADS, WD10EARS, WD8000AARS, WD7500AADS, WD7500AARS, WD6400AADS, WD6400AARS, WD5000AADS, WD5000AARS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS and WD7501AYPS hard disk
drives are affected by this issue.
Users who want to install the fix have to download the ISO file available
here and then burn it to a CD or DVD. Before booting from the CD/DVD, the motherboard's SATA controller has to be set in the IDE mode.
Once the DOS tool has loaded, user have to type "wdidle3 /S300" (without the quotes) to change the default timer form 8 seconds to 300 seconds and then "wdidle3 /R" to make sure that everything went OK.
All the Western Digital Caviar Green HDDs that are shipping now are set to park their heads after 8 seconds of inactivity, so this fix is required if such problems are encountered.
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