Just some follow up on this for anyone who finds this thread in a search. The hdparm method described in one of the WD write ups and other places generally does not work. That leaves the wdidle3 utility can be used to disable or at least tame the overly aggressive head parking misfeature on WD Green drives. To do so:

- Get a freedos ISO from the project website here: http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ and burn it onto a CD. Beware that the drivers have ATA support but don't seem to have SATA support, so a SATA CD/DVD drive may not work with it.

- Get the wdidle3 utility from the WD support website linked from the support articles below, and burn that onto a CD as well.

- Boot the FreeDOS CD, make sure you can see the CD drive (which was on X: for me), then replace the CD with the one containing wdidle3, change to that device, and run it as follows:

This should report the HD drive version and the current timer value. The green drive needs to be on a primary SATA IF (not a USB adapter or the like) and I'd recommend that it be the only HD attached when you do this. Once you verify that the utility can see the drive do this to disable the head unload timer:

Note that the head will still be unloaded when the drive spins down due to the power being shut off, but that's good and healthy. Alternately you can set the idle timer to a larger value (5 minutes seems to be the max supported).

A few notes on FreeDOS. Pay careful attention while Freedos is booting, it will tell you which device letter is being assigned to the CD drive but it goes by very fast. There are also USB bootable images available which may simplify your life, but I haven't had much luck with them. I don't know why WD doesn't supply these utilities as a bootable ISO themselves, the hoops they make you jump through to fix this are really absurd.

I now have 2 WD EAR drives in my machine both of which I thought I had prevented the frequent head parking by adding to /etc/rc.local.

On the basis of tjc's post, today I installed smartctl using and discovered the cycle count was going up continuously so the hdparm method was not working, as you said.

I then created a bootable USB stick using DOS-on-USB on a windows machine and copied over the wdidle3.exe file to the stick. The machine booted successfully and very quickly to DOS and I was able to execute wdidle3. At first I tried to disable the head parking. It indicated parking was disabled but when I rebooted to LinHES the cycle count had accelerated to about 1 per second. I then tried as someone has suggested. That was not accepted, in fact the set time had to be between 8 and 300 seconds. So I have settled for ie parking the heads every 5 minutes which is 37.5 times better but still not ideal.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

The Load_Cycle_Count on mine has been sitting at 923 ever since I used wdidle3 to tweak it. Are you doing this one drive at a time and checking both of them?

No I did wdidle3 to both drives and then monitor individually. Should I try the /d option to the drives independently?

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Probably worth a shot. One of the IT guys I work with tried to run the utility for me on various spare hardware with a different boot CD, but it never worked until I used the FreeDOS CD as described above with only the one drive attached.

As I probably said before, it baffles me why WD doesn't provide these things as bootable ISO images with a free OS that they know works...

So is there anything at all to recommend buying WD Green Drives.....
I currently have 'em on my 'no buy list' ....

Well they're quiet and use less electricity, but they don't seem to have such good reliability numbers, so anything you save in electricity you may lose in replacement costs and hassle... I certainly won't be buying another one.

I consider a drive to be a reliable fixture.... Don't know how much electricity you can save with one, but hassles and replacements are a no-go with me.

In 20 - 25 years of working with hard drives, I have never had one fail... I have, however, a large box full of perfectly functional drives that were retired for being too small .....

I finally got around to looking at this again. I opened the box, unplugged sdb, booted to my DOS-on-USB stick and ran "wdidle3 /d". I then closed the box and rebooted to LinHES. Watching the cycle counts now I see that sda only increases with machine boots (I shutdown on ACPI), while sdb has increased a bit more. Therefore I deduce that it is necessary to run "wdidle3 /d" on individual drives by unplugging the other drive.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

tjc,
Are you happy with the horsepower of your new CPU/video card? Have you tried HULU desktop? or other Flash videos at full screen, stuff like "House" from www.fox.com, etc?
Thanks.
zig

I was a bit nervous about the GeForce 210 based video card, and would have preferred something with a GT 430, but it's handled pretty much everything I've thrown at it. My VDPAU playback settings are one notch down from the highest, and it plays back 1080i, 720p, and everything else I've tried, including some 1080p samples. (I'm running the most up to date flash player which supposedly takes advantage of the VDPAU capabilities for streaming content.)

The CPU has never broken a sweat, the monitoring says that the CPU usage has never been above 75% (I think it was commercial flagging or transcoding with something else going on), and the temperature has never gotten above 35C. You could easily use the slowest Athlon II X2 (245) and still have horsepower to spare.

Thanks Tjc for reporting your Flash experiences, I was curious because it's not clear that hardware acceleration is supported for Linux. From the Adobe web site:I suppose a possible test might be to turn VDPAU off and play something in Flash and see if CPU usage changes.

Toggling the hardware acceleration option in the flash player settings menu definitely has an affect, and with it enabled the GPU definitely seems to be doing more of the decoding work, because GPU temps are higher and CPU usage is lower.

Ok, thanks. That's good to know. One more question
I'm assuming you still got acceptable Flash playback even with hardware acceleration turned off. Is that right? (Just looking for more CPU data points.)

Yeah, at a rough guess the box has about 2x the minimum required CPU bandwidth for the job (in both the broad and specific sense). Even without VDPAU one core is enough to completely cover the video decoding load (with cycles to spare) leaving the other free to do all the OS housekeeping.

You could put more CPU in, possibly even make use of it on rare occasions (commercial flagging, and transcoding, and updating the program guide, and watching HD TV, and ... all at the same time), but mostly what you're be doing is wasting hardware $ and energy $ and building a box that runs hotter and/or louder, and ...

I should do a tier 2 posting for this box with a list of the components I'd recommend or not. The motherboard is on the NOT side. Mostly because of the stupid on board NIC.