Which HDDs feature parking of the heads?

Which HDDs feature the automatic parking of the heads after a certain time? Are there drives that will basically always turn and never park the heads?

dracon9,

This is a feature of our WD Green and WD Red family of disk drives.

Thank you for your answer. So all Blue, Black and RE drives will always turn and never park the heads, even if they are not in use (read/write), correct?

dracon9,

Correct to an extent. There are RE variations of the WD Green family, but yes, WD Blue and WD Black are designed to keep a constant spin behavior and RPM.

Ok, so that means: Green and Red are good for power saving, but Blue and Black are good to keep the load cycle low because they never park the heads?

Is there a section for download of detailed information (manual etc.) on the RE and other drives?

dracon9 wrote:

Ok, so that means: Green and Red are good for power saving, but Blue and Black are good to keep the load cycle low because they never park the heads?

 

Is there a section for download of detailed information (manual etc.) on the RE and other drives?

And another question: What is the difference between Blacks and Desktop Performance drives?

Do RE4 drives park the heads?

Are you going to reply or should i take this as an example of the customer service of WD?

dracon9 wrote:

Are you going to reply or should i take this as an example of the customer service of WD?

Please bare in mind that this is not the support line for WD.

This community is for users helping other users.

If you have a support question please contact them directly.

http://support.wdc.com/?wdc_lang=en

And why are there people from the WD staff here? Shouldn’t they answer questions about their products?

Especially since there’s no way to contact WD support unless you registered one of their products. I am currently considering buying one and want to inform me about the products before i buy - as customers usually do. But when i get no answer, i cannot buy WD products since then i don’t know what their specifications are.

WD Staff is here to facilitate the conversation by providing input in some topics every now and then.

The support lines are open for assistance if you wish to contact our support personnel directly.

http://support.wd.com/contact/contact.asp?lang=en

This link only leads to the WD Support Portal, where i can only write to WD if i registered a product. So it’s impossible to contact WD that way.

WD Blue 2.5 also parks the head. I don’t know about other models since I use mostly Blues and Greens.

dracon9 wrote:

This link only leads to the WD Support Portal, where i can only write to WD if i registered a product. So it’s impossible to contact WD that way.

Hi dracon9, you can also contact support by phone. 

Service & Support

http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp

beLIEve wrote:

WD Blue 2.5 also parks the head. I don’t know about other models since I use mostly Blues and Greens.

Great, so the reply from JStaff was wrong.

Is there actually anybody at WD who knows the technical details? I guess if I would call support they wouldn’t have any clue…

beLIEve,

That is true for older 2.5" WD Blue disk drives before the introduction of the 2.5" WD Green product line. Newer 2.5" WD Blue disk drives are more in tune with the design of 3.5" WD Blue disk drives.

dracon9,

“Desktop Performance” is a retail kit for the WD Black product line as opposed to the bare/bulk drive itself. WD RE disk may park heads depending on modle variation (WD RE vs. WD RE-GP).

JStaff : I just bought some WD10JPVX last week, made in April 2014. They’re so new that they feature the 3.5" Green behaviors (autopark on idle), and even newer, the APM gets reset to 0x60 whenever the drive is restarted. Now if you’re saying that they behave closer to the 3.5" Blues, I’d really appreciate it if you could give me a firmware patch to achieve that :slight_smile:

Same issue/problem with parking heads on WD10JPVX (WD 1TB BLUE) parks like crazy every 8 seconds, APM also gets 0x60 and should be 0x80.

I dont know why WD do not fix that :manfrustrated: