Optimal WDIDLE3 Setting For WD20EARS Hard Drives

Five minutes sounds right to me. That’s the standard in the instructions IIRC.  You might even go down to 1 or 2 minutes in a USB enclosure.

This is the thread, I’m sure you have already been reading it.

community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Green-Caviar-High-Load-Cycle-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731/page/3

I have not tried it on an EARS drive but other apparently have.

I have kept the bootable thumb drive that I made from the instructions. They are so cheap its worth having a dedicated one.  Added HDSentinel DOS to it, and used that for checking drives on a server that had motherboard mirror raid.

Regards,
David