I just purchased four 2T WD gold drives, model WD2005FBYZ-01YCBB2. MFG dates are Sept 2017 thru Dec 2017. Three have firmware version 80.00A80, and one has firmware version 01.12B.3. The four drives are installed in a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ V1 network storage (upgrading from four 1T WD Green drives that are 9+ yrs old with zero issues). The three drives that have FW: 80.00A80 are racking up the “load cycle count” with little over 37hrs of run time one drive shows 216 load cycle counts. The drive with FW: 01.12B.3 has only 1 load cycle count with 28hrs run time.
Question is what firmware is current / newer? Also can i change the three drives to FW: 01.12B.3 if it is more suited for NAS operation, or is there a better FW for NAS.
Load Cycle counts on the three drives with firmware ver 80.00A80 are reporting in the thousands with a little over 40 hrs run time. How do I get the drives replaced with new drives loaded with FW 01.12B.3? The drive with FW: 01.12B.3 has a cycle count of 2 after 51hrs run time.
UPDATE:
Load Cycle counts for the NAS installed WD Gold drives. Disk 1,3,4 are FW 80.00A80. Disk 2 is FW01.12B.3.
Drive # Count Hours
|Disk 1 7093 @ 179hrs
|Disk 2 0 @ 170hrs
|Disk 3 6959 @ 160hrs
|Disk 4 8090 @ 147hrs
I created a DOS boot USB and ran the WDidle3 program on the four drives. The three drives with FW 80.00A80 had the idle timer enable and set at 8 seconds. The one drive with FW 01.12B.3 had the idle timer disabled. As of 4:33PM EST, 1-26-2019 I have disabled the idle timer in the three drives with FW 80.00A80. I will check the load cycle counts for the next few days and report back, but I expect all to be good from now on. I hope this information will help someone that might be seeing the same issues I have had.
