Read this thread if you own a Western Digital "Green" HDD.

Some time ago, I noticed my new netbook's disk regularly lagged when opening tabs on my browser, or playing games (particularly, when Warzone 2100 changed to another music track). These pauses lasted 2-3 seconds and occurred several times a day, which made them highly frustrating. I researched all the possible causes, but no fixes worked until I stumbled upon the following information.

The "Green" line of drives has an idle timeout (called "Idle3" by Western Digital), which parks their heads when reached. This is supposed to save energy by not making the head work if it's not required. The problem is, said timer is set to a very low value by default, and the head doesn't instantaneously return to operation when work is required once again; there's a delay of a few seconds, which causes the aforementioned freezes. So much zigzagging also wears it out. The disk head becomes a possible point of failure after approximately 600000 parkings, of which an average user burns 40000 a month.

Unless you leave your computer idle for long periods, or only use your WD drive(s) for data storage, the power saving achieved in this manner is rather negligible, and thus not worth the constant freezing and reduced lifespan.

You can find many sources for the above information by looking up "Western Digital" plus "idle", "Load Cycle Count" or "APM" in your favorite search engine, including an official support article where the company suggests spacing automated writes to avoid this :rolling_eyes:

However, there is a solution. According what I've read and then converted into personal experience, there are three possible ways to solve this problem, depending on your model: using an official DOS-based tool to disable Idle3, using several unofficial programs available to disable APM, or both.

The DOS tool is called WDIDLE3 and can be downloaded here. If you need a FreeDOS disk image with the program included (you can't run it from Windows or DOSBox), to write on a floppy or use with the bootable flashdrive creator of your choice, let me know. Executing WDIDLE3.EXE /R displays the current idle timeout. Using the /D switch turns it off.

If that's not enough to stop the freezes, you need to also turn off Advanced Power Management. There are many free tools to do that, the easiest I've used being HDDScan. However, there's yet another pitfall. Your particular model might not store the setting permanently, resetting the APM value when power cycled, meaning you'd have to do this after every cold boot. Thankfully, there's a program called quietHDD that stays resident and changes the setting whenever necessary. I personally used a Windows port of hdparm, scheduled to run on startup and whenever the computer resumes from hibernation (that's event ID 1, source Kernel-General, log System).

After doing all this, the clicks should be gone, and the Load Cycle Count SMART attribute won't go up a few hundred times per day. :happy:

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The disk head becomes a possible point of failure after approximately 600000 parkings, of which an average user burns 40000 a month.

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let me guess, warranty expires after 1 year

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you need to also turn off Advanced Power Management.

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what about the windows option for power settings: 'turn off hard disks', if set to 'never', makes no difference?

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the power saving achieved in this manner is rather negligible, and thus not worth the constant freezing and reduced lifespan.

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interesting definition of 'green', that one

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Originally Posted by slikrapid

what about the windows option for power settings: 'turn off hard disks', if set to 'never', makes no difference?

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I'm afraid not. The Windows timeout is different: it spins the disks down instead of merely parking the heads like Idle3 does. I'd recommend disabling that as well, since making the motor start and stop is also harmful (and takes longer).

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interesting definition of 'green', that one

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:yup:

The idea isn't particularly bad, it's just that the head parking is done more often than it should.

Do not buy the green hard disk of Western digital they die fast
I lost 500 GB of material :frown::shockkk!::stupid::mad::baeh: because of the odd glitch green version of Western Digital
Too bad I did not see the post before I bought 3 Terra Green
the slowe end you cenot instol os on this green hd it is green $$hiitttttttt:baeh: (ops sory)
Smart court says
Cheap is expensive

Are there also "green" external hdd?

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Originally Posted by yoco

Are there also "green" external hdd?

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internal or external dösn't matter. it's the same disk just in a case.

How do I check if it's green or not?

It got Green in its name, written on the Case.

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Originally Posted by Instab

internal or external doesn't matter. it's the same disk just in a case.

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Don't forget the USB-to-IDE/SATA bridge. Some are low quality and don't allow you to query SMART values or make changes like turning off APM, which is what this thread is about.

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Originally Posted by yoco

How do I check if it's green or not?

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If what supermarrioh said isn't an option, you can search the disk's name (as visible in the Device Manager) in your favorite search engine. The specifications should appear.

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Do not buy the green hard disk of Western digital they die fast

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Blue is what you should be aiming for. They are designed to be used similar to a black WD.

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what about the windows option for power settings: 'turn off hard disks', if set to 'never', makes no difference?

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No. The park timing is located in the drive's firmware and can't be altered by windows.
What you are referring to is just used to save power at the expense of disk reliability. Think of it like this: HDD will park it's head every x seconds with windows already turning it off/on several times a day, resulting in more head parks... .

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Are there also "green" external hdd?

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Yes. An external is the same as an internal drive. The only difference is the converter, in this case a SATA-USB or SATA-1394(FireWire). What you see is the case (box in which an internal HDD is).

Here's a nice note I took for myself to remeber what to buy and for what. Maybe it'll help you guys make better decisions.

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Red
Red is designed for 24/7 operating environment. use it for small office and home use networked attached storage (SOHO NAS).
Highlights:
• RPM: 5400
• Designed for RAID

Blue
Blue is designed for solid performance and reliability for everyday computing. Good for desktop PC's and certain industrial applications.
Notes: For non-intensive disk operations, a blue HDD might perform similar to a black HDD.

Green
Green is designed for cool, quiet and eco-friendly. Designed for use in secondary drives in PC's and other applications that needs low noise and heat.
Highlights:
• RPM: 5400

Black
Black represents maximum performance for power computing. For professionals looking for leading edge performance.

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My external hdd is called WD My Book 1140 USB Device in my Device Manager. Any idea how to check if it's green?

I don't think you can. The only way is either opening the case and take a look inside or getting the serial of the HDD (for instance in HDTune, info tab) and try to search in google.

I downloaded HDTune, and the serial number is WD-WMAZA8571956. But google doesn't find anything!

Western Digital Caviar 2 TB,Internal,5400 RPM,3.5" (WD20EARS-00MVWB0)

If my searching skills haven't failed me, that's the disk inside your case, and yes, it's a green one.

How did you find this info?

I searched the non-numeric part of your serial number in DuckDuckGo. It led me to a Russian site where someone posted a SMART log of a Caviar disk with the same S/N prefix, model string included. I searched the latter, and found the drive's sale name on eBay, as well as a forum thread which confirmed your particular model is affected by this.

Do I have to use all 3 ways or I can choose?

That depends on your disk. I have a WD3200BPVT-22JJ5T0 and had to disable Idle3 and run the APM tool under Windows.

You might need a bootable DOS disk with USB support to run WDIDLE3. If you have a recent copy of Hiren's Boot CD, I think it already includes both of those things.

I found this on my drive Hirens.BootCD.15.1. Is this good? What do I need to do? Did your method work for you?

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Originally Posted by yoco

I found this on my drive Hirens.BootCD.15.1. Is this good? What do I need to do?

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Boot from the CD. Select "DOS Tools", then "Hard Disk Tools", then "WDIDLE3 1.05". Wait for it to load, then type WDIDLE3.EXE /D and press Enter. It should tell you if the timeout was disabled or something went wrong.

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Did your method work for you?

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Of course :wsmile: Only 340 head parkings since I started this thread. Note that I had to disable APM under Windows in addition to the method above, so if you want to be 100% sure, download the quietHDD program (link is in the first page) and follow the instructions.

I found new version, Hiren.s.Boot.CD.15.2.Rebuild. This one is also good, right?

How do you know you only had 340 "parkings"?

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Originally Posted by yoco

I found new version, Hiren.s.Boot.CD.15.2.Rebuild. This one is also good, right?

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If it includes the usual DOS tools (which I'm sure it does), then yes.

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How do you know you only had 340 "parkings"?

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Comparing the value of my drive's Load Cycle Count attribute (this is shown in any program that can display SMART attributes, like Defraggler) when I wrote the first post vs. what it is now :wtongue:

I'm gonna try this as soon as I can.

Revisiting this thread too, to post new information.

It seems Toshiba 2.5" disks also have this "feature". Although it is not as aggressive as Western Digital's nor does it cause lags, I don't want to think my disk is actively wearing itself out every time I use my computer.

The 1 TB external disk I got as a present last year and the one in my new laptop are both of that same brand. Setting the APM value to 255 doesn't work on these, it resets itself back to 127. You have to set it to 254 instead. To accomplish this, use the hdparm fork mentioned in the first post for internal drives, and HDDScan 3.x for external ones.

In the latter case, an additional measure must be taken. The USB-to-SATA adapter seems to do power management as well, so you need to write something to disk regularly to keep it active. Drop the following batch file on its root and keep it running as long as it's plugged in:

Code:

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@echo off
title Prevent drive %cd% from going to sleep
color 0e
rem echo ( Current path is %cd% )
:init
echo.
echo ( Writing data to disk... )
echo.
echo %time%>NoSleep.dat&more<NoSleep.dat
timeout /t 60 /nobreak
rem Note: timeout only works on Windows Server 2003 and above
goto init

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Somewhat ugly, but it works.

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Originally Posted by anon

Revisiting this thread too, to post new information.

It seems Toshiba 2.5" disks also have this "feature". Although it is not as aggressive as Western Digital's nor does it cause lags, I don't want to think my disk is actively wearing itself out every time I use my computer.

The 1 TB external disk I got as a present last year and the one in my new laptop are both of that same brand. Setting the APM value to 255 doesn't work on these, it resets itself back to 127. You have to set it to 254 instead. To accomplish this, use the hdparm fork mentioned in the first post for internal drives, and HDDScan 3.x for external ones.

In the latter case, an additional measure must be taken. The USB-to-SATA adapter seems to do power management as well, so you need to write something to disk regularly to keep it active. Drop the following batch file on its root and keep it running as long as it's plugged in:


Somewhat ugly, but it works.

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Which Toshiba 2.5 hdd are affected by this anyway to find out cause I have a toshiba external HDD and after my snafu with my laptop HDD I don't want an encore

http://www.sb-innovation.de/attachme...chmentid=15374

That's my model. Other ones in the Canvio line are also affected, from what I've read.

Using any program that can display SMART data (like Defraggler) is a quick way to find out. Plug the disk in, write down what the "Load/Unload Cycle Count" attribute is, wait a minute, copy a file, immediately check the attribute again, redo this a few times. If the amount of cycles went upward every time, you have a problem.

Up goes this, because it remains a problem for most disks of all brands to this day. Here's a quick info dump.

• https://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/ - quietHDD. If you don't have too much time, this is the simplest and fastest solution. Install, run as administrator, configure it to disable APM and AAM and keep it open.
• https://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/ - hdparm for Windows. A very old Cygwin port, but it still works. Install, delete its startup shortcut, then save the following code block as a .xml file with UTF-16 encoding and import it to your task scheduler (note the red comment).

Code:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<Task version="1.2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2004/02/mit/task">
  <RegistrationInfo>
    <Date>2019-09-05T21:35:07.7749152</Date>
    <Author>redacted\redacted</Author>
    <Description>Keeps APM, AAM, standby timeout and Seagate power saving disabled on the first hard disk.</Description>
  </RegistrationInfo>
  <Triggers>
    <BootTrigger>
      <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    </BootTrigger>
    <EventTrigger>
      <Enabled>true</Enabled>
      <Subscription>&lt;QueryList&gt;&lt;Query Id="0" Path="System"&gt;&lt;Select Path="System"&gt;*[System[Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power'] and EventID=42]]&lt;/Select&gt;&lt;/Query&gt;&lt;/QueryList&gt;</Subscription>
      <Delay>PT5S</Delay>
    </EventTrigger>
  </Triggers>
  <Principals>
    <Principal id="Author">
      <UserId>S-1-5-18</UserId>
      <RunLevel>HighestAvailable</RunLevel>
    </Principal>
  </Principals>
  <Settings>
    <MultipleInstancesPolicy>IgnoreNew</MultipleInstancesPolicy>
    <DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>false</DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>
    <StopIfGoingOnBatteries>false</StopIfGoingOnBatteries>
    <AllowHardTerminate>true</AllowHardTerminate>
    <StartWhenAvailable>true</StartWhenAvailable>
    <RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>false</RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>
    <IdleSettings>
      <StopOnIdleEnd>true</StopOnIdleEnd>
      <RestartOnIdle>false</RestartOnIdle>
    </IdleSettings>
    <AllowStartOnDemand>true</AllowStartOnDemand>
    <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    <Hidden>false</Hidden>
    <RunOnlyIfIdle>false</RunOnlyIfIdle>
    <WakeToRun>false</WakeToRun>
    <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT0S</ExecutionTimeLimit>
    <Priority>7</Priority>
    <RestartOnFailure>
      <Interval>PT1M</Interval>
      <Count>10</Count>
    </RestartOnFailure>
  </Settings>
  <Actions Context="Author">
    <Exec>
      <!-- Edit the path if you're not on x64 or have installed hdparm somewhere else -->
      <Command>"C:\Program Files (x86)\hdparm\hdparm.exe"</Command>
      <Arguments>-B 255 -M 254 -S 0 -Z sda</Arguments>
    </Exec>
  </Actions>
</Task>

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Registry tweaks also exist, but are driver-dependent and only apply on startup (when the driver is initialized) in any case. For Linux, the equivalents are putting hdparm on /etc/rc.local and/or creating a udev rule; check your distro's documentation for more details.

Note that disks do not necessarily obey the "disable APM completely" command sent by hdparm, CrystalDiskInfo and others. You'll have to set APM to 254 in that case. Here's a table explaining all the possible values.

Code:

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Advanced Power Management (APM)
*Count*                *Level*
00h                Reserved
01h                Minimum power consumption with Standby
02h-7Fh        Intermediate power management levels with Standby
80h                Minimum power consumption without Standby
81h-FDh        Intermediate power management levels without Standby
FEh                Maximum performance
FFh                Reserved

Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM)
*Count*                *Level*
00h                Vendor Specific
01h                Retired
80h                Minimum acoustic emanation level
81h-FDh        Intermediate acoustic management levels
FEh                Maximum performance
FFh                Reserved

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When a disk is idle, at least some of the following timers can run concurrently, and should one of them "win", the disk will spin down. Disable or bypass them all and you'll prevent this from happening.

• OS idle timer - configurable through its power settings. Changes can be stored persistently.
• APM spindown (for certain values as per above) - configurable with `hdparm -B', quietHDD, CrystalDiskInfo, HDDScan and many others. Changes are lost after a power cycle or ATA software reset.
• ATA standby - configurable with `hdparm -S'. Changes can be stored persistently.
• Enclosure idle timer (for externals) - very rarely configurable. Use a script or program that regularly writes to the disk to keep it active as a workaround (see post #24).
• Idle3 (Western Digital only) - configurable with WDIDLE3 (DOS) or idle3ctl (Linux). Changes can be stored persistently.

I tried QuietHDD. It's running in taskbar, how do I know it's disabled APM and AAM? Right clicking shows "disable system suspend" and "disable HDD APM now".

I think the program's homepage explains that fairly well...

Windows 8.x and above added more aggressive power management for USB devices. If your external disk goes to sleep after applying all of the solutions I mentioned above, merge this to your registry and reconnect it. (Also worth doing for thumb drives if you notice them lagging more than they should or suddenly disappearing.)

Code:

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REGEDIT4

; NOTE: replace the red text with the Device Instance Path for your
; disk's USB interface, exactly as shown if you open its details in the
; device manager, without any spaces or newlines
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\VID_aaaa&PID_bbbb\cccccccc\Device Parameters]
"DeviceSelectiveSuspended"=dword:00000000
"EnableSelectiveSuspend"=dword:00000000
"SelectiveSuspendEnabled"=hex:00
"SelectiveSuspendSupported"=dword:00000000
"EnhancedPowerManagementEnabled"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\VID_aaaa&PID_bbbb\cccccccc\Device Parameters\WDF]
"IdleInWorkingState"=dword:00000000

; NOTE: replace the red "aaaa" with the four-digit string following
; "VID_" in what you pasted above, then do the same with "bbbb" but use
; the "PID_" string instead
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\aaaabbbb]
"DeviceHackFlags"=dword:00000400

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is this good external hard drive:

WESTERN DIGITAL WDBYVG0020BRD:confused:

The issues with Western Digital's aggressive power management are all workable as long as you follow the advice in this thread. For an external disk, you'll have to use idle3ctl under Linux instead of WDIDLE3, since USB support for DOS is fickle and you may not even be able to boot it to begin with (modern motherboards no longer have BIOS interrupts or a compatibility module).

I found this, but don't currently have an affected disk at hand, so feedback is welcome. openSeaChest is available for Linux and Windows and can be downloaded at https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.

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For Seagate drives with PowerChoice technology, tricks setting APM via hdparm will not work due to the EPC (Extended Power Conditions) feature. Rather than setting APM, you can install openseachestAUR and fully disable EPC like so (replace X with actual drive letter):

Code:

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# openSeaChest_PowerControl --scan
# openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdX -i
# openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdX --showEPCSettings
# openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdX --EPCfeature disable
# openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdX --showEPCSettings

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Last invocation will give the following summary:

Code:

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==========================================================================================
 openSeaChest_PowerControl - openSeaChest drive utilities - NVMe Enabled
 Copyright (c) 2014-2023 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved
 openSeaChest_PowerControl Version: 3.3.1-4_1_1 X86_64
 Build Date: Jul  4 2023
 Today: Tue Jul  4 17:49:36 2023        User: root
==========================================================================================

/dev/sdX - ST1000NM0008-2F2100 - ZFA19JG2 - SN02 - ATA


===EPC Settings===
        * = timer is enabled
        C column = Changeable
        S column = Savable
        All times are in 100 milliseconds

Name      Current Timer Default Timer Saved Timer  Recovery Time C S
Idle A      0            *10          *10          1            Y Y
Idle B      0            *1200        *1200        3            Y Y
Idle C      0            6000          6000        16            Y Y
Standby Z  0            9000          9000        46            Y Y

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Zeroes in the first column confirm that parking and spindown were disabled successfully

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