As a reply to myself at : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comments/431 WD got back to me with this reply :
--- Dear Igor, Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. The drives have a minimum life of 600K cycles. There is a utility that you can run to alter to a max of 25 seconds, or disable the load/unload cycles the drive performs. It is recommended to alter the load/unload cycles rather than a complete disable. Please see the attached file. Sincerely, Michelle D. Western Digital Service and Support http://support.wdc.com --- On their support site I found a program called wdidle3.exe. The accompanying wdidle3..txt says : --- WDIDLE3 Version 1.00 for DOS DESCRIPTION - DOS Level utility to setup or report the idle3 value. FEATURES - Scan for all drives. Non-WD Drives shall only show the model and serial numbers. - Uses a Vendor Specific Command to set or get the idle3 timer. - Timer can be set from 100 ms to 25.5 seconds, in 100ms increments. USAGE WDIDLE3 [/S[<Timer>]] [/D] [/R] [/?] where: /S[<Timer>] Set timer, units in 100 milliseconds (1 to 255). Default=80. /D Disable timer. /R Report current timer. /? This help info. DOS ERRORLEVEL 0 No error 1 Drive problem 254 Internal program error 255 Invalid command line argument --- Since I do not have a floppy drive on this machine, and after a few hours of unsuccessful fiddling with FreeDos booting from a USB drive, I still have no idea if this helps. But there is an interesting stuff in the text file. The default is 80, so 8 seconds. That would mean that the drive is sent to park every 8 seconds? The other weird thing is that the maximum is 25 seconds. That would be worse then the number of parks right now. Or am I reading this wrong ? Anyway, I hope somebody finds this info useful. If not, sorry for spamming... Igor -- High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
