Posted on Thursday, April 21 2011 @ 0:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NGOHQ
reports Western Digital's Caviar Green HDD lineup suffers from a critical design flaw caused by a too aggressive power-saving feature that puts the disk in idle mode after just 8 seconds of inactivity. Details on how to fix the issue can be found at the link.
According to an in-house investigation and user reports', some software and operating systems are incompatible with the Intellipark feature causing endless head parking movement as the HDD continuously goes in/out of idle mode. This abnormal behavior creates stress on the HDD and that could lead to the following issues:
Loud clunking/clicking/buzzing noises every few seconds.
Artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles in S.M.A.R.T.
Possibly shortens life-time of the HDD.
Possibly reduces performance of the HDD.
Western Digital posted a knowledge base article, where it claims that "The number of systems using such applications and utilities is limited", a statement which we believe is false and inaccurate. Sending an HDD to idle mode only after 8 seconds of activity is abnormal behavior, which much software doesn't like as they are constantly writing and reading data to/from the HDD.
