I have a WD Elements Desktop external HDD. It contains WD Green WD15EADS 3.5" disk drive and a USB-SATA converter board. The converter chip is Initio INIC-1607P with an external SPI flash 25X10A. The problem is, the drive automatically spins down in some minutes of inactivity. Apart from it's bad for drive, it is often annoying to wait till one will be accessible. Is there any ways to disable this feature?
I tried to run wdidle3 utility on disk extracted from case and connected directly to SATA port on PC. It worked, now it shows that automatic spindown feature is disabled, and disk doesn't stop when connected to PC. But in it's stock case it still stops in a few minutes.

heheh

See,
- Install Latest Smartware SW from WD website
- plug your hdd
- from options inside you can set it to NEVER spin down

good luck

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The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

einstein9, my drive isn't listed as supported by WD Smartware. But i installed it. There is NO "Sleep timer" button on "Settings" tab. Many other functions of this software are also disabled. So looks like it really doesn't support WD Elements series.

sorry i did not pay attention to Elements. hummm
too bad

i have another Q for you, ARE YOU USING WIN7???????

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

einstein9, yes, i use Windows 7. If you wanted to say i must disable HDD power down in Control panel, i've already done it, but it didn't help. The drive still spins down.

I think the problem should be in USB-SATA bridge firmware. But i found no datasheet for this IC nor any flashing utilities.

try WinXP and see the Diff.

this is Damn Win7 issue, since i have Ext. adapter for 2 hdd`s which i use mostly for RAID cases UNDER WIN7

i noticed this issue specially after leaving it scanning over-night, i thought on the beginning its the Ext. , but later when i tested it on WinXP
it never spin down.

try it your self and see

in fact i was looking for any tweak to switch this off in Win7 but nothing so far.

you will notice ALSO if you have 2 hdd`s inside Win7 (master:win, slave:data) the slave will spin down after a while of inactivity

good luck

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

@Vasily,

Based on the useful comments by einstein9, and since you said:


... IMHO you also need to disable the Win7 USB power-saving, to achieve what you want - that can cause an external enclosure to power-down the drive, as it "thinks" it has been unplugged from the PC, when the Win7 USB power-saving occurs. I've seen it before with Win7 on friend's PCs (but I can't do any testing for you, as I don't use Win7 myself ).

BTW, I disagree that spinning-down a drive is necessarily bad for a drive. Drives in external enclosures sometimes run hot (e.g. insufficient airflow) and running hot can also shorten the life span of a drive. Just IMHO.

Totally agree to this. It's better to wait 1-2 seconds for drive to spin up and have access to data, than significantly shorten the life of a drive (or totally kill it from overheat).

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I thought that spinning down the drive too often shortens it's life (if the temperature conditions are OK). WD says that maximum number of start-stop cycles is about 300,000. According to SMART my drive already has 65,000 cycles, and i'm using it relatively rare.

OK, i've disabled USB power-saving, will see how it'll behave.

Please can you give us the current SMART data (including raw values)? (e.g. screenshot or text output, whichever is easier for the SMART utility software you are using)

USB power save disabling didn't help. The SMART readings are in attach.

There were about 800 "soft-bad" sectors, which have disappeared after erasing the drive through WD Data Lifeguard, and didn't show up during full scan with Victoria for DOS. But some data was lost, and there were sudden slow-downs during copying files from the drive. I think that frequent spin-downs is the reason of this, but maybe i'm wrong.

That's a shame - as I said earlier, I've seen Win7 USB power-saving cause something similar, so it was worth trying.


Thanks. That shows an average of nearly 18 head unloads per hour (i.e. average of 3-4 mins between unloads/spindowns, which is obviously unusual), and based on the figures, I agree that WD have based the "cooked" (normalised) load/unload cycle count, on an expected lifetime of 300,000 cycles.

If I was in your place, I would attach that drive to a non-Win7 system. If you don't see the same spindowns after just 3-4 mins, that tells you there is something about Win7 causing this. If you do see the same behaviour, that points to the USB-SATA bridge (based on your earlier results). Unfortunately, as I don't have one of these drives, and don't use Win7, there's no investigation I can do.


Seeing the SMART data before running WD DLG would have been useful. However this is interesting (and slightly worrying) new information. Perhaps there is more than one problem here...

After more thought, there are other possible explanations - so if it was me, I would still perform the test that I suggested, but I've edited my previous comments slightly...

Sorry, I didn't save it.

Unfortunately i have no XP PCs nearby, but i used it on a XP PC, and it behaved the same. I've also tried to connect it to XBox360, same thing.
So, that's my conclusion:
There is no way to disable this feature. WD released an utility for WD Elements SE called "WDIdleDisable", and it's not compatible with Elements Desktop, i've tried (AFAIK Elements SE contain drives with on-board USB-SATA bridge, and Elements Desktop use dedicated USB-SATA converter boards). The problem may be hidden in SPI Flash chip attached to bridge IC, but desoldering it will make the board unusable (according to topic found on this forum), and the size is about 128 kbytes (i doubt one could fix it, the datasheet for the bridge IC is not available). So the only way is to use another enclosure.

Saying about load/unload cycle count. I've noticed that this value stopped rising since i've used wdidle3 utility on internal HDD. So it looks like drive stops (Start/Stop count value) by the command from USB-SATA bridge, but it parks heads itself. It's the common problem of WD Green Series drives.

in this case i guess the last option will be (since you insist) Backup you data then use ANOTHER NORMAL EXT. BOX.
i cannot think about any other solution really.

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

@Vasily,


OK, that's a pity. I'm concerned about your earlier comment regarding "soft bads" but I have no data to review, so I cannot give any comment.


Thanks for these 2 pieces of important new information. At least you can now stop worrying about the load/unload cycle count increasing, which you mentioned earlier.

Although there is another area I would investigate if I had one of these drives, unless another member has a suggestion, the simplest option for you seems to be as einstein9 suggested (although I would still be concerned about the possibility of overheating). Good luck with whatever you decide.