I've been buying 8TB Hard Disks from Western Digital for the past year or so since I slot 8TB drives for my server. I just bought one that's on sale directly from the manufacturer, and they made a sneaky change over the last year by preventing the official IDLE3 Tool from working.
Basically, WDIDLE3 is a tool that disables the "power saving" features of the hard disk.
Out of the box, the hard disk is programmed to put itself to sleep by "parking" the hard disk arms to the resting position after 8 seconds of inactivity. This is probably ok for most casual use of just dumping data to the drive and not using it, but in a 24x7 high-use environment (like a server box) the drive would be constantly parking and unparking (cycling) the heads, causing wear and tear that would cause the drive to power save itself into self-destruction.
And this has happened to me. I had a 2TB Western Digital Green a decade ago last only a year and I had to salvage the data with data recovery tools. Eventually I read the data off the drive and the head cycle count was in the hundreds of thousands (!) so the drive essentially wore itself out because of that.
I have ten 8TB Blue drives in my main server, and they've been happily running along for almost two years 24x7 with the head cycle count less than 50. They had the WDIDLE3 power saving disabled.
Well it was all fine and good until I bought a newer 8TB drive, same Blue branding, but the model number is just a little off.
WDC80EAAZ instead of WD80EAZZ. I tested the EAAZ drive, and **it cannot have it's power saving features disabled.**
The EAAZ drive only has 124 hours, and it has 37 Cycles on the head already.
Compare that with the older EAZZ, 17200 Hours, and just 43 cycles!
I predict that the EAAZ drive will park it's head to self-destruction, much like the bad old days of WD Green Drives.
Buyer beware.
(Search "green wdidle3" for more information on how bad this can get)
#tech #server #enshittification
