Does wdidle3 still work on the newer WD Blue 8tb drives?
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Hi @jjis2010
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Yes I checked, no mention of wdidle3 in any article.
I have not bought the drive yet. I want to know if wdidle3 is still supported before I do buy the drive.
All hard disks support idle states as part of the ATA6 standard. All SATA disks support ir.
The program WDIDLE3 can change to park setting on WD drives, can the program do that on newer Blue drives?
parking is also automatic, wdidle3 is unneeded
On the older Blue drives I think it parked after 8 seconds by default. With WDIDLE3 you could disable it or set it 300 seconds. What is the park settings on the newer Blue drives?
Windows 10 and 11 by default now more aggressively idle storage devices. If you want to change it is is in the control panel. Look under power options and create a custom plan. Then in the custom plan you can change advanced settings. I have hard disks set to never so that they are more available. On battery I set them to 10 minutes.
That’s not the same thing as the park settings.
when the disk is idled in the power plan the disk moves the hear assembly to park and the motor spins down
WDIDLE3 modifies a parameter in firmware module 0x02. Newer drives have locked down the firmware, so this module may not be accessible in the same way. This is especially true if the WD model is a rebadged HGST. HGST drives have their own separate, incompatible firmware architecture.
So there is no way to change the park settings in the newer drives?
I am not aware of any DIY solution.
This is why I suggest using Windows defaults as this works for 99.9% of users
Some drives have their own aggressive APM settings which are unaffected by OS manipulations.
Does Seachest Utilities from Seagate work with newer WD drives?
WDIDLE3 modifies WD’s firmware. SeaChest can’t do this. As for APM settings, those are configured using standard ATA commands. I have no idea what SeaChest does with APM. In any case, APM settings are probably volatile, which means they don’t survive a power cycle.
AFAIK WDIDLE3 has used back when EIDE disks were in use. SATA use ATA6 standard which is much more comprehensive.
On the previous model, WD80EAZZ , WDIDLE3 worked. Why was there a change with the new drives?
This disk series is about 5-6 years old so they support ATA6 and functions are all automatic to be OS independent etc
