Load Cycle fix needed for Mybook 2TB?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi,

I was wondering if the EADS Green drive in the Mybook elite needs the load cycle fix that many talk about doing for their green drives?

Here is the link/tell internal EADS drive owners are using:  http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=124&t=20907

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

Use a SMART utility to examine the Load/Unload Cycle Count.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

3

Thanks. I tried both apps but neither allowed for a load cycle count or smart scan for the mybooks.

Are there any other options?

thanks again!

4

Perhaps neither application understands how to communicate with the USB-SATA bridge chip inside the enclosure.

You could try smartmontools (Linux / Windows):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/ http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download

Can you see the bridge chip inside the USB enclosure with Microsoft’s UVCView utility?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

What are its Product ID and Vendor ID?

5

That’s because that utility is designed to communicate directly with the firmware of an internal hard drive, and not through the bridge chip of an external.

6

Actually thats not quite true.

If you have the My Book Home 2TB drives hooked up via USB you can read the Load Cycle Count ( 0xC1) using HD Tune

Unforutnately the 2TB MY Book Home does have the Load Cycle Count problem in newer drives.

One seems fine (21915 cycles for 6850 hours on time - roughly 3 times per hour) and my 3 newest drives have several hundred per hour of operation.

Sadly wdidle3 v1.05 doesn’t recognise the drives as being WD because they go through the bridge as previously stated but could also be because when I first powered them in order to flash the newer 1034_1_03 firmware they did initial report themselves being a WD20EADS-00R6B0  (all three newer ones). I’ve long since forgotten what my original 2TB said it was before the firmware upgrade.

Now my system info tools all say the drive is a ‘WD MY Book’ depending on how it’s connected.

Anyway to cut a long story short and so as to not cut the lifespan of my drives short please can you include the ‘WD My Book’ in the list of drives that can have their Load Cycle time limit extended?

When i run wdidel3 v1.05 on a My Book Home connected via External SATA - which I assume is almost direct or atleast without a USB bridge - I getthe error below:

VSC Enable CMD Error 51 04 00 00 00 or something like that probably for exactly the reason Bill said…

So should I remove the drive (and void warranty of course) and do this via a direct SATA connection?
So to reconfirm:

I am seeing the very high Load Cycle Counts on newer My Book Home drives here (all 3 are 2TB) and I cannot use wdidle3 v1.05 to modify the timeout even when they are connected via the external sata bus.

Please can you help?

Regards

Steph

7

FWIW, you can see several “VSC” text strings in wdidle3.exe, after you unpack it with UPX (see below).

VSC enable
VSCDataOut
VSCDataIn
VSCSendKey
VSC Error
ataVSCGetZoneTable
ataVSCNative

I suspect that VSC refers to Vendor Specific Commands, ie ATA commands that are not part of the ATA standard. Such commands would be unable to pass through a USB-SATA/PATA bridge.

Working Draft AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2008/D1699r6a-ATA8-ACS.pdf

UPX: the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables:
http://upx.sourceforge.net/

8

I´m the sad owner of a WD My book elite.

I´m experiencing some lock ups, when i´m transfering files to the drive.

I´ve been reading a lot in here lately, and camt to think about maybe my drive was bothered by this.

Therefor, i got a hold of HD Tune Pro, and tested the drive. I can see, that the drive under a speedtest get drop spikes. Are any of you getting the same?

http://img687.imageshack.us/i/mybookeliteusb.png/ - spikelags.

Also, i´m not the best to read out the S.M.A.R.T, but i could see that my LCC is i current at 770, and is leveling about 1 up every 3 minutes. Is that OK?

http://img263.imageshack.us/i/mybookeliteusb2.png/

9

Oh well. Maybe the LCC is bad on mine - just checked the count again, and now its up to 794. 15 minutes ago, it was on 775.

That would say my drive has a fault with LCC ?

10

@Santa

For comparison my ‘good’ drive has around 6000 hours on time and averages about 3-4 LCCs per hour (total 21k lifetime LCCs).

My newer and higher Load Cycle Count My Book Home drives are doing several hundred per hour.

At this rate it will have caught up to my older drive in a matter of days.

It’s clearly acting as intended but introduces a delay and click sound everytime is has to move the head on and off the ramp (about 8 seconds after the drives last use.

Obviously moving the head about is what drives do all the time  whats of concern is the ramp loading and unloading itself at this rate I will hit the MTBF rate of 300k per WD’s documentation.

I simply want a way to turn this feature down. I’ve timed it and the drive ramps the heads about 8 seconds after the last use. This is a rediculously short time… something like a few minutes would seem a reasonable way to match the MTBF of this feature with the overall expected lifespan of the drive.

I really wouldn’t bebothered if this was a 250-500GB drive but it’s a 2TB monster and this ‘feature’ seems like an achillies heal to me.

Not to mention the overall environmental footprint it’s supposed to save of managing a warranty  return and all the other effort/energy use associated with a premature drive failure.

@Fzabar  

Thanks for the info… I agree I think the eSata/USD/FIrewire logic is masking these extended ATA/SATA commands from the drive. If I fancy risking it I’ld have to open the My Book and pull out the drive for direct WDIDLing but I don’t want to do that until I know whether the  WDIDLE3 will work with this My Book’s model hdd: WD20EADS-00R6B0

Anyway I really hope this wdidle tool can be easily modified to work with an eSata connect My Book Home.

~ Steph

ps. I noticed using the HD Tune SMART info refresh causes an unload… if you let your drive idle for more than 10 seconds you’ll hear the drive park the heads… click fresh and you’ll hear the drive unload/unpark the head…

11

@StephK.

About the “update” button makes a click from the HDD, i experience the same sound - but.

Today i cracked my disc enclosure open, pulled the WD20EADS (yes, its the green caviar) out and put in in my desktop PC.

Bootet wididle3.exe up and disabled the head unload - come to think about it, i should have just extended the unload to 5minutes or so.

Good news are that i definetly can see a difference with the lcc - since i´ve put the drive back in its enclosure again for 30minutes ago, Hd tune havent registered one count yet =). Also, the refresh button in HD Tune is not able to make that clicking sound when i press refresh anympore.

Oh well, that only just cost me my warranty, for a week old drive - but if WD says the warranty is off after 300K lcc, then its better to void the warranty allready instead of loosing backups etc. incl. the drive.