New WD30EFRX Red Drive Idle3 Timer Set to 8 Seconds (High LCC in NAS)

Debra, regarding your second to last sentence. if you run WDIDLE3 with the /r switch, it will tell you what your drive Idle3 setting is currently.

Regarding question 3 “Does this load cycle indicate the number of times that the disk is accessed by the system, in 24 hours?”    No it only indicates when the heads have been commanded to  “park” over a special non-data section of the drive. The concern arises from the fact that this is a metric which the manufacturer has given an “expected life cycle” number to, which would be reached relatively quickly when set to 8 seconds. It’s doubtful that it would affect the warranty, since that is time based, but we are all concerned that it could affect the operating life of the drive.  Good luck, we must all be masochistic.

Just a quick update to my earlier post.  The 4TB REDS (WD30EFRX) are now on the ReadyNas supported drive list, so I just purchased two. I checked before installing and they both came with an Idle Timer value of 300 seconds. So now my LCC numbers are hardly moving (3 after 39 hours on). So this seems to have resolved the LCC issue.

I do hear drive activity and a soft “clunk” sound every 3-5 seconds regardless of whether there is data on the nas, shares turned on or off, antivirus on or off or connected to the network or not. I suspect this is a ReadyNAS issue and not the drives.  Netgear tech support has been unable to explain the activity as normal or not, but uncommanded drive activity just bugs the heck out of me. So I will chat this up on the Netgear boards.

Thanks to everyone here for their input.

Thank you MGBear, I did receive my new WD Red drives today, the 1 TB ones. I used the WDIDLE tool and checked them first as you suggested with the /r switch after the WDIDLE3 command, after I installed them into my NAS. They both came back with a reply of the 300 second setting, so I left those two alone. I will format them into a Raid next.

My serial numbers for the two affected 4 TB WD disks that had enormous( LLC values(10865, and 10787) as compared to  the StartStop Count(583 and 583) and PowerOffRetract Count(1 and 1), were:

WD-WCC4E0540xxx and

WD-WCC4E0546xxx

I set both of these HDDs idle timers to 300, as suggested by others, since I think they were on 8 or less(this was before I knew about the /r setting to check the present idle timer in each disk’s firmware).

So I hope these serial numbers’ info. may help others as this thread helped me greatly,

Debra

I just bought 3 WD40EFRX (Feb production date) and confirmed with wdidle3 that thay are set for 300 seconds as well.  I’ll stick with that unless I see any issues.