Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux

From: Tvrtko A. Ursulin
Date: Fri Apr 11 2008 - 17:00:10 EST



> >I got back from WD's tech support and received a DOS utility which can
> > control this drive feature, apparently using vendor specific commands.
> > With it head unload timer can be disabled or set to a period between
> > 100ms and 25.5s.

Followup with some good news.

Head unload timer settings seems to be persistent across powering off. Having
set it to a maximum value of 25.5 seconds my disk is now behaving much more
reasonable.

To actually do it I used FreeDOS floppy image burnt on a CD-RW as a bootable
image plus wdidle3.exe in the filesystem itself.

BTW, WD's tech support has gone silent so chances for an easier solution are
not so great.

Tvrtko
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/