Solving WD Green excessive load/unload cycles

Charlie · January 22, 2014

Okay so yesterday I bought a new 2TB WD Green drive and to check its health i loaded up HD Tune but my attention was drawn towards my older 1TB WD Green media storage drive which I had installed less than a year ago, it had unusually high head load/unload cycles way more than my WD Blue 640GB which I use for steam. With a load cycle of around 300000 I am afraid my drive wont last long.

So After few minutes of googling I learnt that many are having the same issue this is because the drive parks the head after about 8 seconds of idle time to save power (Intelipark) but there is a tool by WD called WDIDLE3 which disables the Intelipark technology or you can even extend the time to 300 seconds.

Here is the procedure I followed:

Step 1: Download WDIDLE3 from here

Step 2: This tool only works in DOS mode so you will need a bootable USB drive instructions are given here

Step 3: After you format and make the drive DOS bootable, copy the WDIDLE3.EXE on to your drive, then you need to restart your computer and unplug all other drives except the WD Drive you want to adjust the timer on. Set your controller to IDE (mine was on AHCI so the USB boot thing didnt work at 1 go :lol: )

Step 4: boot from USB drive into DOS mode then type WDIDLE3.EXE /R this should report drive serial number followed by how much time the intelipark is set to (mine was on 8 seconds)

To DISABLE intelipark type WDIDLE3.EXE /D

To set it to a higher value type WDIDLE3.EXE /s300

Thats it! Power off your computer unplug the USB drive, connect back your other hard drives if you have unplugged and set the controller back to AHCI (in my case)

Alright so I ended up disabling Intelipark and now the drive counts 2-3 per day. Just got peace of mind.

PS: just to be safe I took a backup of my green drive before running this tool, its been a day both drives are running fine!!

wpirobotbuilder · January 22, 2014

Or you could use the drive for its intended purpose.

This is good, but the Green drives were designed to park their heads to save energy. The whole point of the lineup was to have low-power low-cost storage that wasn't accessed frequently (or if it was, it was accessed in large chunks at a time). For that use case (such as media file storage), it works very well.

Charlie · January 22, 2014

Or you could use the drive for its intended purpose.

This is good, but the Green drives were designed to park their heads to save energy. The whole point of the lineup was to have low-power low-cost storage that wasn't accessed frequently (or if it was, it was accessed in large chunks at a time). For that use case (such as media file storage), it works very well.

That is what i'm using it for! My boot drive is 256 GB SSD Steam runs on a 640 GB dedicated WD Blue. My green drives contain songs, movies and tons of photos!