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73416ba
(Get the code!)
As a reply to myself at : https:/
WD got back to me with this reply :
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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://
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On their support site I found a program called wdidle3.exe.
The accompanying wdidle3..txt says :
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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