hdparm -B doesn’t work - you get an error message.
hdparm -i tells you that the drive doesn’t support APM (AdvancedPM=no).
There are reports that WD is aware of the problem but doesn’t officially admit the problem. When you contact WD support they will send you a DOS tool called wdidle3 which allows you to change the timer settings. I guess they use vendor specific commands. I contacted them yesterday - no response yet. I found a copy on the Internet but I won’t use software from insecure sources.
Today I did a test: I set up a cron job that logged the load cycle count every 30 minutes. On my idle computer (I was at work) I got frightning results. Now here is an excerpt:
2010-03-25 10:00:01 37605
2010-03-25 10:30:02 37665
2010-03-25 11:00:01 37725
2010-03-25 11:30:01 37785
2010-03-25 12:00:01 37845
2010-03-25 12:30:01 37905
As you can see an increase of 60 every 30 minutes. That’s because the kernel flushes dirty buffer pages every 30 seconds. If it goes on like this the drive will reach its life time limit within a few month.
