I just bought the 1TB 2.5" 7200RPM WD Black WD10JPLX HDD. Which should be delivered in a few hours. I guess I should first ask. Do these new drives still use IntelliPark? Do Black drive use that feature? If so. It is safe to use wdidle3.exe to change to 300Seconds (5Mins) on the drive? If not, what tool can I use to change it. Thanks for any help that is given.
I dont remember the WD Blacks having that feature, I remember the WD Green and the WD Red, however you might want to contact support as they should be able to answer that question.
I’m also considering buying 2,5" moblie black wd drive. But the blue drive drove me nuts with its intellipark/power management. Could you please tell me how the black drive behaves? Did you have to go to wdidle3 and change to 5mins?
Recently I’ve bought a WD Black Mobile drive (WD10JPLX) for
stationary use because of its good performance/noise trade-off.
This drive has a default APM setting of 128 (80H) which
aggressively applies IntelliPark leading to a load cycle count
increase of approx. 25-50 per hour regardless of the underlying OS.
This can be surely overcome by using CrystalDiskInfo/hdparm,
but I do not understand how the drive can reach its warranted
age of 5 years without easily exceeding the prognostic
lifetime load cycle count of 600.000 using standard settings ?
I understand that head parking is not only important for
power/heat reasons, but is also crucial for improved shock
resistance at present head flying heights.
The problem is that it is silently assumed that the user will
tolerate a reduced drive lifetime on unexpected failure of
the APM tweaking software which is unacceptable for data
safety reasons. The APM timers can’t be modified by using dedicated
software like wdidle3/apmtimer on these drives. I would therefore
expect WD to ship the Black Mobile’s with more appropriate APM
settings or provide software/firmware to change the APM standard
settings.
I agree with everything written in post above -why are drives sold with such agressive APM is beyond me. I understand battery life is important, but still. I must note that compared to Blue 1TB (APM 60h), Black 1TB (APM 80h) is much more relaxed. For me Blue (60h) is a useless hard drive.
Did you receive any messages when you attempt to modify them?
Can you access your hard disk, watch the time, leave it idle and listen to the faint click to see how long it is between your last access and the faint click? See if it matches the idle3 timer and apmtimer. It should park its head at the lower value between the two.
