I have had a couple of email exchanges with WD Techical Support on this, the latest being today. I asked them 3 questions and have posted their responses below. Just as a reminder, my issue is a brand new WD30EFRX from Amazon that out of the box has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds. When installed in my Ultra 4 it climbed to 1200 LCC’s in the 1st 24 hours.
Questions to WD Technical Support and their replies below
1. Is there something wrong with this drive? At the current rate of head parking this drive will reach a count of somewhere in the 2-3 million cycles before the 3 year warranty period is reached. If WD really believes that the drives can survive this many parking cycles why do you only list 600,000 in your specification? Since this will be 4-5 times the specified value it does appear something is wrong with the drive.
(WD Response) Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digital’s WD Red, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles.
They also stated in another email that “To date, we have had no reported hard drive failures due to cycle and load times with any of our drives.”
2. Should the Idle3 timer have been set to 8 seconds when I received it? I have seen several other postings and test data/reviews on the internet where people state when they received their WD30EFRX the Idle3 timer was disabled?
(WD Response) - They did not answer this question
3. Is there something I can do to reduce the LCC concern and increase the life of this drive if I am still concerned about it? I have seen several posts where people claim that using the WDIDLE3 tool works OK, but it is not listed as a drive for this tool on the WD web site. Is this tool OK to use or is there something else that can be done to change this operation?
(WD Response) - The WDIddle3 utility has not been designed for this particular product. However, we’ve seen cases where customers have used the tool with this internal drive and managed to set Idle3 to max time which effectively turns off load/unload power saving feature. Please also find the link for the WDiddle3 utility which should allow you to set the WDiddle 3 for your needs.
[http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... 13&lang=en](http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en)
Note that this is version 1_05. I have seen references to a version 2.0…, but have never been able to find a copy of it. The link they sent me is for version 1_05 and it worked fine for me.
I have used the WDIDDLE3 (version 1_05) tool to set the Idle3 timer on my WD30EFRX to 300 seconds and so far I have only had a couple of LCC increases in a few days. Although this is a pain to deal with, I still believe this is a good drive for the NAS application and have another drive on order. It will be interesting to see if it also has the Idle3 timer set to 8 seconds when I receive it. If it does I will also change it to 300 seconds.
I plan to let them close the ticket and just plan to use WDIDDLE3 on any future drives when needed.