[PLUG] backup drive in a NexStar dock

[Denis Heidtmann]

The failure I posted about previously was due to the NexStar dock.  The
drive worked fine in a borrowed USB/esata enclosure (Rosewill).

I have taken the NexStar apart but have found nothing obviously wrong,
other than some poor workmanship.  I will be checking the power supply next.

Thanks for all the advice I received here.

During my research for alternatives to the dock I ran across this from the
man page of hdparm:

*-J* Get/set the Western Digital (WD) Green Drive's "idle3" timeout value.
This timeout controls how often the drive parks its heads and enters a low
power consumption state. The factory default is eight (8) seconds, which is
a very poor choice for use with Linux. Leaving it at the default will
result in hundreds of thousands of head load/unload cycles in a very short
period of time. The drive mechanism is only rated for 300,000 to 1,000,000
cycles, so leaving it at the default could result in premature failure, not
to mention the performance impact of the drive often having to wake-up
before doing routine I/O.

WD supply a WDIDLE3.EXE DOS utility for tweaking this setting, and you
should use that program instead of hdparm if at all possible. The
reverse-engineered implementation in hdparm is not as complete as the
original official program, even though it does seem to work on at a least a
few drives. A full power cycle is required for any change in setting to
take effect, regardless of which program is used to tweak things.


Note: Trying to get WDIDLE3.EXE from WD showed that the SW was for
upgrading the firmware for only three specific drive models. Mine is not
one of those. The option -J indicates that wdidle3 is disabled; -g
indicates that Power-Up In Standby feature set is not enabled. The label on
the drive indicates that a jumper (3 to 4) will enable Power-Up in
Standby.  So it seems that the man page is out of date wrt WDIDLE3.EXE.

I would like to determine what is the idle timeout value is set on my main
WD drive, if the issue is still important. (Not and issue for the backup
drive.)

-Denis