Will warrant be forfeit after using wdidle3?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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My caviar green drive (WD10EARS, 1T, 64M) has a high LCC in a rather short time (known as 'C1 Gate").

I know that wdidle3 can be used to disable or change the idle time.

But I heard that if you use wdidle3 to modify the parameter, then the drive is no longer in warrant.

So [Q1] is the ‘lose warrant’ saying true?

(I tried other softwares to change AAM, but they seem incompatible with EARS.)

And I wanna ask [Q2] what is WD’s explanation toward ‘C1 Gate’?

The soaring C1 figure surely indicates that the lifespan of the magnetic head is greatly shorten. How can you assert it’s a feature rather than a flaw?

I have made contact with the customer service about this through e-mail and telephone. The e-mail got no reply. The hotline said he found no related data in his computer and hadn’t even heard of it!

btw As far as I know, the ‘C1 Gate’ influences most caviar green (e.g. AADS, AARS, EADS, EARS) and some caviar blue (BEVT) model that were produced this year. Some that were produced last year do not have this problem.

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No reply?

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How do you get that firmware upgrade (wdidle3) to work with EARS series ? (that should only be possible if the ICs/circuitry is the same for both the WD10EARS and the below mentioned drives (know that WD1000FYPS has a smaller Cache but maybe that is no problem if the new firmware can cope with that))

So have you done (updated firmware WD10EARS with wdidle3)  that and how did you do that ?

Quote from WD :

“”

This firmware modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics. This utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.“”

Would sure love if that worked with WD10EADS also :)))

But any way quite sure you will loose your guaranty if you use it on other drives that the mentioned

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If the firmware update bricks the drive, it should NOT affect the warranty.

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Thank you for the official clarification Bill_S.

My point was, as I can’t find an wdidle3 firmware update for the EARS series (or he EADS series as well )(But maybe i haven’t been looking the right place ? ) it was implied that he had to modify the above mentioned wdidle3 update to get it to work on EARS series and that would to my knowledge brick the  warranty and only give the desired result, if the drive electronics is exatly the same circuit with the nessesary space in onboard RAM.

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Thanks for your reply, Bill_S.

But just as DualportSRAM has mentioned above, wdidle3 doesn’t say it is designed for EARS,EADS, though I’m sure it works on these models. And it warns:

CAUTION: Do not attempt to run this software on any hard drives other than what is listed above.

(see http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113)

So is it still under warrant if I use wdidle3 on my EARS?

And, well, as I’m not native English speaker, I don’t quite catch the meaning of ‘brick’. Would you please paraphrase it? thanks.

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I’ve seen lots of people recommending using wdidle3 to change the default idle time for EARS and haven’t seen anyone say it can’t. So I think It should work (under DOS commandline).

And I suppose wdidle3 is a modify tool rather than a firmware upgrade.:smiley:

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i have used and abused it

used 4 times in the same drive wd20ears

allways working great

the only problem to me for this drive is the new 4kb sectors and its support

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Thx for all the answers.

And THX for the Kudos Bill_S

@ limilaw

Not native English speaking too but in my understanding “Brick” means here to make the warranty obsolete, but maybe you get an official reply concerning the warranty and using the wdidle3 utility on drives it is “not officially” made for.

“”

And I suppose wdidle3 is a modify tool rather than a firmware upgrade. :smiley:“”

Yes and no.

To change any drive parameter for good you have to write the parameter change to the hidden part on the drive disc where the firmware resides when drive is not powered.( not sure if that this is exactly how it is done but queues I am quite close in my assumptions) 

 If you use a utility to change the acoustic management of your drive the changes will be gone when you power the drive down (not guessing here)

My queues is the the firmware lies on a hidden part of the drive and is read into RAM when the drive is powered on, which means that any change must be written to this hidden area to be permanent.

Have you used  wdidle3 on EADS with success ?   :)))

Have 6 Pcs. WD10EADS so quite interested to hear if it could work w/o changing the drives model no or other stuff (especially the possibility to change TLER from off to on)

Cause suspect that the constant on/off loading of the head assembly when drive goes in to/out from lowpower/sleep is the main thing that causes these drives to fail.

But this is maybe solved by turning all green Sh** off in BIOS and in WIN7 64 Ultimate ?

@DavidSucesso

Thx for the nice info.

Would also wish that WD just changed the sector size to 4096 and that the drives had no Advanced Format stuff going on.

Better to fix the sector 63 skew problem using a new standard for MBR on the operative system side.

Maybe WD could be persuaded to make a utility that turns off Advanced Format ? (so you just have a drive with 4096 size sectors)

 I hope so but doubt that will ever happened.

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the only problem here is updating the firmware… all problems should be gone if WD decides to update the firmware of the drive

my drive has been manufactured in 1 may 2010 and has the new firmware

please run some cd or utility that boots into dos before windows

run wdidle3 /r ( if the drive reports the seconds at idle correctly, the tool is supported

i have run the utiliity by mistake in another drive and says that wdidle3 is disabled in the other drive manhufactured in 2007 from WD :slight_smile:

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THX NICE info  DavidSucesso

Have just been looking at another thread :

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Green-Caviar-High-Load-Cycle-Cout-after-short-operation-time/td-p/15731/page/6

Here it is said that you can use wdidle3 /D to turn head offload totally off but with the chance of performance of the drive going down.

Apparently the ?max value of 300 seconds is a better possibility (wdidle3 /S300)  ?

But anyway would be better if WD officially did support using wdidle3 on EADS and other green series drives as you also mention in your post.

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im glad it helped

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113

here is the tool for download

read the txt carefully

its easy to do

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If 4KB sector drives are used as system disk, you may try ‘WD Align’ utility.

I didn’t try it because I use Win Server 2008 R2, but it should work because it’s an official tool.

The only thing to notice is that this utility involves moving of data, so it may take several hours if the driver is full.

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Ehem Limilaw

how does WD allign tool for Advanced Format drives adjust any “Green” (idle) parameters in drive ?

:))

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I use the WDIDLE3 utility to change the default 8 second timeout for WD20EARS driver.

Originally, I extended this to 300 seconds / 5 minutes, which is the maximum.

The pair of WD20EARS are jumpered for XP, and used as a RAID1 pair with Intel ICH10R hardware.

The entire volume is D: and has no system use.

System Restore is disabled on all drives.

I still notice the drives spinning down for normal desktop use.

I’m thinking of using WDIDLE3 to disable the spin-down entirely.

When the system goes into Standby after an hours’ inactivity, the disks will spin down at that time.