[mythtv-users] WD Green drives (was "complete system meltdown")

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 11 February 2014 22:39, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
> > That way I can have the drives on either my USB3 docks or my eSATA
> docks and still be able to control the timeouts when I need to.  If a
> WD drive is on a USB3 interface, idle3ctl does not work, and in any
> case you need to cycle the power on a WD drive after using idle3ctl
> before it uses the new timeout.

As far as I know:

intellipark has nothing to do with what hdparm -S allow you to set
(timeout for spin down)
intellipark is different to your typical full park as done by many hard drives..

The only way to modify the timeout value used by intellipark is to use
the wdidle3.exe utility (or the open source equivalent idle3tools).

spin down, and parking wears far more on the disk than what intellipark does.

For some pictures of the mechanism and a rough explanation:
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/#post-99494