Hello.
I followed the procedure you described above.
The Sleep Timer on my Passport drive is currently set to ‘10 minutes’ (this is the lowest permissible value for Sleep Timer). There were other values like 15, 30, 90 minutes and ‘Never’. The current value of 10 minutes is okay.
After reading my initial post again, it seems I was confused. I mixed up between ‘the hard disk idling (spinning down) due to inactivity’ and ’ the drive heads parking to rest position few seconds after a read/write operation’.
Here is what I am trying to achieve:
1> I want to DISABLE the ‘head parking feature’ on both these drives. This is what is causing the ‘Load Cycle Count’ value to increment by 1 after about 10-15 sesconds. If disabling is not possible, I want to set the duration to a higher value (like 5 minutes) before the heads park.
2> I want both my external USB drives to spin down (i.e. enter ‘Idle’ mode) after 10 minutes of inactivity. This is where the drive stops spinning (or slows down) when it is not accessed for some time.
My primary goal is to prevent the head from parking on both drives. This feature is built into WD Green desktop drives where the drive head parks every 8 seconds and also in the 2.5 inch laptop drives.
As for 2> above, I think the spin down time (Sleep Timer) on both drives is more than 5 minutes. So, that is not a major issue. Sleep timer on the Passport drive is 10 minutes. I don’t know how much it is for the Elements drive.
I mentioned the ‘WdIdleDisable_v6’ utility for disabling the Idle Timer on the Elements drive. There is no README file provided with it. All I know is that it disables the Idle Timer. It is now my understanding that this utility prevents the Elements drive from spinning down ever. I don’t think I need to use it. I was under the impression that this utility will get rid of the head parking feature. There is the ‘wdidle3’ utility for WD Green drives that allows setting the head-parking time to more than 8 seconds or even disable it. Because of the similar names (wdidle), I thought ‘WdIdleDisable_v6’ will fix the head parking feature in the Elements drive. I think it won’t.
So, now my quesion is: How do I get rid of the head parking feature on the two external USB drives below.
The drive spin-down (drive idling) is not a major issue at this time. Anything above 5 minutes works for me.
USB Hard Drive : WD My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 external PORTABLE
Model Number : WDBAAA5000ABK-PESN
Internal HDD Model : WDC WD5000BMVV-11A1CS0
Firmware : 01.01A01
Manufacture Date : March 2010
USB Hard Drive : WD Elements SE 1 TB USB 3.0 external PORTABLE
Model Number : WDBPCK0010BBK-EESN
Internal HDD Model : WDC WD10JMVW-11S5XS0
Firmware : 01.01A01
Manufacture Date : December 2012
Thank you and sorry for the confusion.
