WDIdle3 - disable head parking on Western Digital hard drives. Hitachi Travelstar HDD repair. Disabling frequent head parking

Some models of Seagate hard drives are distinguished by the fact that they have an inadequately low waiting time before switching to power saving mode, in which the read heads go into a parked state. Such a transition is accompanied by a characteristic crackling-whistle-creaking sound and in the case when hard drive This is not systemic, it can happen every few minutes. Needless to say that, in addition to the risk of failure from excessively frequent parking, it is also simply annoying with its chirping sound?

It is not particularly surprising that Seagate specialists do not want to provide users of their products with any way to permanently disable auto parking on many models of their hard drives. We have to reinvent the wheel again.

You can verify that there is a problem by the rapidly increasing value of the parameter Load/Unload Cycle Count in the S.M.A.R.T of such a drive. If the value of this parameter is hundreds or thousands of times different from the parameter Start/Stop Count, then obviously your hard drive is susceptible to this problem.

To forcibly disable parking in a system running Windows OS, we will use a ported version of the Linux utility hdparm and the standard Windows scheduler.

You can download the hdparm assembly for Windows in our archive.

First, you need to find out what the dissected disk is called in Linux terminology. Launch the command line ( cmd.exe) with administrator rights and call through it hdparm.exe -i /dev/sdX:

C:\>"c:\Program Files (x86)\Tools\hdparm\hdparm.exe" -i /dev/sda /dev/sda: Model= ST1000DM003-1CH162, FwRev=CC49, SerialNo= S1D85MBP Config=( HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% ) RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize =0kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=268435455

So, in our case Seagate drive designated by /dev/sda. If he were second in the system, then his designation would be /dev/sdb, if third – /dev/sdc, etc.

Now open the Task Scheduler ( taskschd.msc) and create new task. On the first page, indicate an arbitrary name for the task, select a user SYSTEM and indicate that the task must be executed with maximum access rights:

On the triggers tab, create a trigger to perform a task when the system boots:

In addition, we will need to create another trigger to perform a task when the computer wakes up from sleep, because Disabling parking will also fail when the computer goes into sleep or hibernation:

Then go to the actions tab and add a launch hdparm.exe with key -B 255 /dev/sda which will disable parking on the sda ​​drive:

This completes the setup - save the created task and manually launch it from the scheduler task library to check it. Then click on F5 to update the library - if everything went well, then in the column with the result of the last launch of our task the code “0x0” will be indicated.

Now we can open any disk health monitoring utility - for example, CrystalDisk Info - and make sure that APM is disabled on the selected hard drive. This task will run every time the computer is turned on or wakes up from sleep mode, and thus keeps auto parking disabled.

PS: We take this opportunity to say hello to the Seagate firmware writers. May you all have hiccups there.

This thing is interesting: a hard drive, a real miracle of technology. In the article I show only one technical feature of this device, and you can’t count them all. Yes, hard drives With development, SSDs will go out of use, but this will only happen later.

Head parking mechanism hard drive next. The hard drive has read heads that move along the surface of rotating plates (called magnetic plates). In this case, the heads do not touch the pancakes, despite the fact that there are no rigid clamps for them. They are positioned and held in position by the interaction of the magnetic fields of a moving coil.

Now let’s simulate the situation: you turn off the computer or the lights go out. The magnetic field disappears, the heads fall straight onto the pancakes; and the rotation speed of the pancakes is 5400-15000 rpm. And, despite the smoothness of the heads, they begin to scratch the tracks, damaging the hard drive.

Badly? Wrong word. The manufacturer urgently needed to look for a way out, and he found it! When the power is turned off, the spindle motor rotates by inertia for some time. What if you put it in generator mode? No sooner said than done. This made it possible to provide power to the electronics board for the time necessary for the correct completion of the work. This power is also supplied to the head drive windings, pushing them towards the center of the disk. Having reached the parking area, the head drive is latched with a magnetic lock even before the heads have time to touch the surface of the disk.
But even this was not enough for the producers! They came to the conclusion that if a conventional parametric current stabilizer is installed between the generator/spindle and the head positioning coil, then it will be possible to regulate the electromagnetic force and, accordingly, the head parking time. All that remains is to write a service manual and place it on disk.

This is the essence of auto parking - any serviceable drive will always park the heads, no matter how suddenly the power is turned off. However, if a recording was taking place at this moment, the consequences could be dire due to unwritten data or control structures file system. chkdsk comes to the rescue.

But when the power is turned on, the disks spin up to the required speed, after which the heads “fly” from the platform to the surface of the pancakes, which are spinning at a high enough speed to prevent the heads from touching themselves.

Now why all this demagoguery? In laptops, there is sometimes a problem when the hard drive beeps every 10-20 seconds. click. The click is nothing more than the parking of the hard drive heads.
Based on other Internet resources, an advanced user decides that frequent parking leads to wear on the mechanics of the hard drive heads. That's true. And then he does the action for which he then has to pay with money. He disables parking with service programs manufacturer. As a result, the hard drive slowly crumbles in less than a year. The user thinks the clicks were due to hard drive malfunction disk, and a year later he died. Buys the next one. And in a cycle.
Looking for a solution to this problem in the OS itself, which you put; Getting into the internal contents of the hard drive controller is contraindicated.

The problem was the following: In the game (in the game Smite), there were periodic lags (about once every 15 seconds), freezing for literally half a second, a second of lag. According to reviews, the same lags are observed in many games, such as Call of Duty, Call of Duty ww2, Battlefield 1, Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and many others.

Usually they advise checking the Internet, lowering the graphics settings, disabling the antivirus, this, of course, can all help, but if this does not help and you have ultra good computer, which is clearly system requirements I have to calmly play the game, but here is the solution.

The problem is this: hard drives There is such a technology called head parking, which removes the reading head of the disk into a safe area so as not to create turbulence over the disk when idle and to reduce wear on the disk.

But sometimes the disk is “idle” for only a few seconds, for example, while you are running in a game through an area that has already loaded and does not require requesting information from the hard drive, but as soon as you get to a new one that has not been loaded into RAM zone, the computer requires information and turns to hard drive. And right at this moment, if your head has already gone to the safe zone, it should return from there, which takes about half a second, which is why the lag occurs.

Solution:

1. If you have another hard drive, try moving the game to it.

But if not, or if you have everything on a Western Digital (WD) disk, as I did, then move on to the second point.

2. And so, you have Western Digital (WD) (be sure to make sure of this)

— First of all, what you need to do is go into the BIOS and change the disk operating mode from AHCI to IDE.
- Watch S.M.A.R.T. your hard drive, any program that can do this, for example, AIDA64, Everest, Victoria, etc. We are interested in parameter 193 Load/Unload Cycle count, it shows the number of head parking times. We compare the number opposite this parameter with the number opposite parameter 12 Power Cycle Count (number of power-off cycles). If the values ​​differ by tens or hundreds of times, then this is our case!
- We need a utility to do this bootable USB flash drive such as HP USB Disk Storage Tool and MS-DOS
— Next, download the WDIdle3 program.
- Next: we make a bootable DOS flash drive, unpack the archive with our program there, reboot the computer, boot from the flash drive by pressing the F8 key, when the computer restarts, we will have a command line for working with hard drives.
- In this line we enter the following commands.
- First of all, the wdidle3 /r command will show the current timer value in seconds. Those. After how long of inactivity the head parks. That's where it usually costs 12.8 - 15 seconds. Those 15 seconds after which you observed lags!
— To completely disable head parking, enter the command wdidle3 /d.
— To set any value, we need the command wdidle3 / s50, where s50 is the number responsible for the number of seconds after which the head will park.
Remember here that values ​​from 8 to 12.7 seconds can be set with an accuracy of 0.1 s. Values ​​from 12.8 to 30 the timer is set only to 30. Values ​​from 30 to 300 - with an accuracy of 30 s. Maximum value 300. Press enter.
— Check if the value of wdidle3 /r is set
— We exit, reboot, check the game, there should be no lags! Hooray!

PS: It happens that after these manipulations, frequent crashes appear on the computer. blue screen and similar unstable work. I recommend that you first completely remove the head parking, check in the game, if the lags are gone, then leave it like that and forget, nothing will happen to the disk, but if you really want to set some value, set it to 300, check, if there are no crashes, leave it and enjoy the game!

If you still experience crashes, experiment with the values ​​and select the one you need.

I also want to note that there are no criminal or fatal consequences in this, it has been proven from personal experience!

All the best!

Working in service center I increasingly began to encounter failures of hard drives in laptops. And the strange coincidence in this situation was that 80% of these disks were 500GB in size. I even stopped advising my friends and clients to buy disks of this size. And this went on for a couple of months until I noticed my own hard drive (hard drive) in my home laptop. What strange thing did I notice? The answer is simple. Periodic extraneous sounds. Sounds that were only audible if you listened very carefully and only when the laptop was standing and I was not doing anything on it.

I'll say right away, I had a hard drive Western Digital 640GB BLUE SATA2 2.5" WD6400BEVT and there were no suspicions of its abnormal operation before, I regularly looked at the S.M.A.R.T. values, everything was fine with them, there were no bad or reassigned sectors on the hard drive. So what is this quiet sounds, which the hard drive made? I set myself a goal and started looking for similar complaints on the Internet and immediately found what the problem was.

It turns out that modern hard drives have a technology for parking the head unit when idle. For what? To save the resource of the heads themselves, disk platters and electricity. The heads hanging above the plates create additional aerodynamic drag, because the discs spin pretty fast high speed, then the air in the can is drawn into rotation along with them, and the head block slows down these air flows. The resulting chaotic “gusts of wind” in turn create additional resistance for the rotation of the plates and energy consumption increases, which increases the temperature, which is harmful to the heads. For example, I’ll say for 3.5-inch disks with a rotation speed of 7200 rpm linear speed the edges of the plates is approximately 120 km/h, and at such speeds the air is already quite tangible, as you can personally verify by sticking your hand out of the car. So, when the computer takes a break from work, and the hard drive along with it, then after a while the Advanced Power Management functions come into operation and they park the hard drive heads. Everything would be fine, but the idle time before activating the energy saving function in some disks is only a few seconds; as a result, it turns out that the disk parks its heads very often. Disk manufacturers claim that disks can easily withstand up to 1 million parking spaces (depending on the disk model), but in practice the number of parking spaces increases very quickly and after half a year of disk operation this number can exceed 200 thousand!

But this educational program should not bother you. Frequent parking will cause your disk to die much earlier than all the phenomena described.

So let's go back, as they say, to our sheep. On my WD6400BEVT drive there were about two thousand parking lots every day, and in just two years it would definitely die from constant parking. I don’t know why my disk had this problem, it was “BLUE” BLUE, although this usually affects models of the “GREEN” GREEN series of disks, the main purpose of which is to save energy.

So. How to check your disk for the presence of such a “disease”? The answer is simple. You need a program that will show you the S.M.A.R.T. parameters. This could be, for example, the AIDA64 (Everest) program or similar. AIDA64 (Everest) - iron monitoring program, in in this case We will be interested in information as in the picture.

We are primarily interested in the parameter С1 Load/Unload Cycle count- the number of head parkings, if this parameter is several times greater (or tens of times) than the parameter 0С Power Cycle Count- the number of disk power-off cycles (can be considered the number of times the computer is turned on if the disk was installed in it initially). This is our case!

What will help us? And a little program called WDIdle3. It only works with Western Digital drives, although this problem found not only in Western drives Digital. In the screenshot you saw above, the S.M.A.R.T. indicators. hard drive Hitachi HTS721010A9E630 1TB 2.5" 7200 rpm - it also suffers from frequent head parking, but it this program Doesn't help. With Hitachi drives the situation is a little more complicated and I will not describe it in this article.

So here it is. First we need to prepare our computer for “treatment”, or to be more precise:

1. Switch the disk operating mode to IDE in the BIOS if you have AHCI installed. Some laptops cannot be set to IDE, so the drive must be removed and connected to a desktop computer.
2. Create a boot floppy disk or USB flash drive with DOS. Read how to create a bootable USB flash drive with DOS if you don’t know how to do this.
3. WDIdle3- actually herself utility version 1.05, the utility was created for a very limited set of disks on which this problem first appeared, but works with all WD disks.

If you have already done all three steps, then unpack it from the WDIdle3 archive and copy it onto a flash drive or floppy disk (depending on what you are using). It is recommended to physically disconnect all other drives except the one you plan to work with and, of course, do not forget to do data backup(but who will do it :) So, we boot from the flash drive and into command line enter:

wdidle3 /r

The command displays information about the current settings of the head parking timer, if the value is read from your disk, then a new one will be written, which seems logical, write down the original value just in case to return the disk under warranty or the disk does not respond adequately. For example, on my disk there were 8 seconds.

So, the time of the head parking timer was found out and remembered or written down. Now we need to install a new one, longer time or turn off the timer altogether. To do this, run the program with the commands:

wdidle3 /d

The command to stop the timer, this setting completely disables head parking during operation.

wdidle3/s210

The team sets the timer to 210 seconds. It must be remembered that when setting the timer from 8 to 12.7 seconds, you can set it with an accuracy of 0.1 seconds; when setting from 12.8 to 30 seconds, the timer is always set to 30 seconds. Values ​​from 31 to 300 seconds are set with an accuracy of 30 seconds.

Help on using the utility can be obtained with the command:

wdidle3 /?

This command provides help on using the utility.

After changing the parameters, you need to type again:

wdidle3 /r

Thus, we can make sure that the new value has been registered and is already After this, be sure to TURN OFF THE COMPUTER POWER holding down the power button for 3-5 seconds.

Now turn on the computer and load Windows. For those who turned off additional disks, before turning on the computer, you can connect them again, and those whoever switched the disk operating mode to IDE in the BIOS, you need to go into the BIOS and change it to again AHCI mode , otherwise you will get a blue screen of death when loading Windows.

Just today I changed the head parking time on two “GREEN” disks Western Digital 2TB WD20EZRX and Western Digital 2TB WD20EARX - the problem disappeared, the time was 8 seconds on each, it became 240 :) The disks work and do not park as often as it was before! Hooray!

By chance I received a Toshiba MQ01ABD050 (AX002K) hard drive, which began to be used in a small stationary personal computer fanless version.

In laptops, there is sometimes a problem where the hard drive makes a clicking sound every 10-20 seconds. The click is nothing more than the parking of the hard drive heads.

Some laptop models periodically park the hard drive heads. Observed on different models laptops and hard drives in them. The frequency of this phenomenon depends on the operating mode. When running on batteries, parking occurs once every 10 minutes. When working from the network - 2 times per minute. Drives from most manufacturers are parked quite rarely (several times an hour). Theoretically, hard drive manufacturers guarantee that the device can perform 300 to 600 thousand parking cycles. If you calculate the operating hours of the hard drive, this will be clearly less than the expected operating life of the laptop as a whole. In addition, in complete silence, the sound of parking is clearly audible and gets on your nerves. It is difficult to describe the sound; it depends on the hard drive model. For example, it is compared to the sound of a pencil falling flat on a wooden table or the sound of a thin glass rod breaking. Anyone who has heard this sound will no longer confuse it with anything else. You can not rely on hearing, but check the presence (or absence) of this phenomenon instrumentally.

In the standard version of the disk, APM is 128, in the improved version it is 254 (disabled). You should naturally have a question: how does parking heads save electricity and battery life? The fact is that the opposite end of the head is equipped with a coil. When the correct power is applied to the coil, it generates an electromagnetic field that allows it to move between two powerful permanent magnets (while moving the opposite end). Interestingly, the APM value can be changed independently. When used on laptops, it is not recommended to completely disable parking, because this is a laptop laptop computer, and one of the features of APM is head parking, which in turn protects the disk surface from damage when moving the laptop (shaking, strong vibrations, impacts, acceleration). In the case of a stationary PC, parking can be disabled during operation, or the value can be set to 250-253. You should not be afraid that the disk will stop parking at all; when disconnected, as before, the heads will be parked in a safe zone.

When viewing the SMART status, it was revealed that the value of parameter 193, corresponding to the number of cycles of positioning the write head in the parking zone, is constantly growing.

Since I didn’t have any service utility for disabling parking, and the website www.bad-good.ru categorically did not recommend doing this, I had to, as it was indicated on it, look for another way.

Based on other Internet resources, an advanced user decides that frequent parking leads to wear on the mechanics of the hard drive heads. That's true. And then he does the action for which he then has to pay with money. It disables parking using the manufacturer's service programs. As a result, the hard drive slowly crumbles in less than a year. The user thinks that the clicks were associated with a malfunction of the hard drive, and a year later he died. Buys the next one. And in a cycle. Look for a solution to this problem in the OS you installed; It is contraindicated to get into the internal contents of the hard drive controller.

It is no secret that nowadays it is often difficult to find “sensible” information. 4 solutions were found. Option 1 worked on the Runtu system.

Since my computer does not use either standby or hibernation modes (they are ), it was decided to implement the “Persistent configuration using udev rule”.

If you do not have the hdparm package, you can find it through the Synaptic package manager. IN Linux Mint it is installed initially, but is missing in Runtu.

Sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda
/dev/sda: APM_level = 128

Sudo hdparm -S /dev/sda
-S: bad/missing standby-interval value (0..255)

Sudo hdparm -M /dev/sda
/dev/sda: acoustic = not supported

Create a file 95hdparm-apm in the /etc/pm/power.d directory with the contents:

#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

Set execution rights to the created file:

Sudo chmod u+rwx,g+rx,o+rx /etc/pm/power.d/95hdparm-apm

After rebooting, check the result using the terminal command:

Sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i "Advanced power management level"

Edit the /etc/hdparm.conf file to include the following:

/dev/sda (
apm=254
apm_battery = 254
}

4th option.(I don’t remember the source)

Create a script in /etc/init.d under the name hdparm_park (the name is given as an example, you can specify your own):

#!/bin/bash
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda

Make it executable:

Sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/hdparm_park

Add it to startup:

Sudo update-rc.d hdparm_park defaults 90

What do the numbers 128, 254, 255 mean? (taken from English-language sources)

For the -B parameter

0 ... 127 – allow you to use the spin-down function of the hard drive;

128 ... 254 – do not allow the spin-down function to influence the operation of the hard drive;

255 – completely deactivates the Advanced Power Management function.

For the -S parameter

0 corresponds to "off";

1 ... 240 – the value multiplied by 5 determines the interval from 5 seconds to 20 minutes;

241 ... 251 – defining intervals of values ​​11 to 30 set a step of 30 minutes to determine the interval values: 30 minutes ... 5.5 hours;

252 – corresponds to timeout values ​​of 21 minutes;

253 – timeout value is determined by the vendor;

255 – interpreted as 21 minutes + 15 seconds.

Quote from an “ancient” publication (2010): “If the APM value is set in the range from 254 - 192, then the HDD will consume “to the maximum.” If in the range of 192 - 128, then in the absence of access to the disk (Hitachi) for 2 - 6 minutes, the actuator solenoid will be de-energized, the heads will be parked on the ramp, the spindle speed will remain at the same level. If in the range of 128 - 1, then with the solenoid already de-energized and the heads being parked, there are no calls to the disk for 5 - 10 minutes, then the spindle speed will decrease to. 5400 rpm."

In addition to laptops, we found more (it was indicated for Arch, the publication is old):

"... it’s better to install tlp and in /etc/default/tlp in the line DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT= instead of 128 128 put 254 254 (be sure to enable the systemctl enable tlp service, or I don’t know what initialization system you have there...

The last time I wrote a manual on this topic, I needed to set the CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT=1 parameter in the /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf file