New Firmware required - WD Blue 1TB WD10JPVX

WD Internal Drives Internal Drives
12

I’m owning the same HDD and same firmware version and the problem has also plagued me a lot. Since there were no updates nor proposed workarounds, I’m reporting my discoveries and successful fix. With the tool CrystalDiskInfo, I observed that the default value for ATA APM (Advanced Power Management) for this WD10JPVX-22JC3T0 was 96 (60 hexadecimal), that should mean quite aggressive Power Management. Other older WD disks like WD10TMVW-11ZSMS5 and WD7500BPKT-00PK4T0WD, I observed a default of 128 (80 hexadecimal). Ubuntu Linux by default uses utilities to full disable APM with 254 (FE hexadecimal). Windows 8,1/10 seems to leave the found value and do not attempt any modification. So my suspicion is that this drive is shipped with an overly aggressive power management configuration that is unsuitable for configurations like dual SSD/HDD laptops, with the HDD not used as the system disk: this setup leads to frequent head parking events because of few writes. So eventually what I did is this:

  1. With CrystalDiskInfo[*], I set the ATA APM Control to the value of 128 (80 hexadecimal). The maximum is 254 (FE hexadecimal). 254 should mean APM disabled, but for me 128(80h) was enough;
  2. As I use HDD as a non system drive, I used the the old DOS util wdidle3.exe (version 1.05 has no more official download but can be found quite easily) to increase the timer for heads parking to the default of 8 seconds to the maximum of 300 (5 minutes). This setting alone was mitigating the problem but not fully fixing it. It could be done but I chose not to fully disable the timer.

Hopefully soon we won’t have HDD anymore in laptops so we won’t have to bother with this kind of problems in the future. Anyway I agree with other people that the HDD we are talking about deserved a firmware update providing a less aggressive default APM value. Still, more relevant technical information should have been provided sooner as “it doesn’t work, provide me an updated firmware” like reports are just gonna be ignored by WD.

[*] APM Controls is in “Function → Advance Features → AAM/APM Control”. As the set APM control setting is not persistent, check “Function → Resident”, “Function → Startup”, “Function → Advance Features → Auto AAM/APM Adaptation”.

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