WD Intellipark - has the problem been solved?

Question

Hey folks,
I want to buy a new hard disk for my arch server. I need a capacity of ~1TB and I also want to make sure, that the emission (noise, heat) and power consumption is very low.
My search for a suitable hard drive led me to the Green series of Western Digital. After some research I found out, that there was a problem with Linux and those hard drives special "function" called Intellipark [1].
Now my question is if this problem is still present or if it has been fixed? I did not find any information on the internet so I would guess that there is nothing new on this topic.
In this case, could you guys suggest me a good hard drive that suites my needs and works fine with Linux (without installing workarounds like idle3-tools).
Thanks in advance!
Links:
[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=73573
Last edited by i3 (2015-04-30 15:23:37)

Answer 1

I own 4 WD green power 3TB disk named EZRX if i remember correctly. All of them had mentioned issue but there is solution for it, and in fact, in my opinion, better that doing something with system configs for power manager - you can download apps named wdidle.exe*** (it's on many cd with managament utilities) and boot it. You have disable all disk, connect only WD, than you can do a change in firmware by typing /d /r /s and it's done. I did it for all my disk. Of course, there is one problem with it - changing this options in firmware causes that heads won't click so many times but i don't know if power manager from hdparm will work. I did some setup in hardparm, but don't know if it works with changed option if firmware.
BTW - if you don't like what you did with firmware, you can enable heard parking the same way.
*in fact this apps is recorded on a bootable CD
Last edited by firekage (2015-04-30 22:41:19)