Hi Community,

For the Western Digital Caviar Green Series and for the notebook-harddisks of WD there is an official firmware workaround designed to switch the default energy-save-head-parking-time-settings of 8 seconds to user-defined values or to deactivate this feature completely. This workaround is called wdidle3.exe, can be started from MS-DOS-boot-floppy and there are two versions of it: 1.00 and 1.03 as far as I know. Western Digital hands over this tool only on request to single customers. WD does not offer it for download. How decent of them. I have applied it and it does fine. Anyway the diagnostic-option of the tool says so. Separate use of smartmonitor-diagnostics should give sureness. It does its job for WD-notebook-hdd's, for EADS- and for EARS-Series. You will find it via search engine. But you may need patience to find it.

hope it could increase livetime of your mass-storage,

best regards,

hans1967