Some more information for you regarding the use of wdidle3 w/ drive model WD8000AARS-00Y5B1:
Using wdidle3 /D had an unacceptable side effect. It caused the drives to slow down very dramatically, perhaps by a factor of 25x or so. In other words, the four drives that I’m using in a soft raid5 array went from an aggregate transfer rate of 40-50MB/sec to about 2MB/sec.
Using wdidle3 /S300 did not have such a side effect; this was a suggested value I found via Google for a major NAS technology provider.
WD may want to update the applicable online documentation.
