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problems using Western Digital Drives with IntelliPark / SecurePark ---> solved
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problems using Western Digital Drives with IntelliPark / SecurePark ---> solved

Audio Preacher 10:50 PM - 7 October, 2009
a few days ago I upgraded my internal disk from 500GB Samsung (HM500LI) to the brandnew released 640GB Western Digital (WD6400BEVT). everything went well, exept scratch live was sometimes responding very slowly when loading a new track or when jumping to cue points. for about a second no audio is heard, waveform is not displayed and during this time the HD-LED is lit. not absolutely critical while playing but when it happens 1 out of 5 times this is getting on my nerves and not feeling comfortable.
after doing a little online search, I found out the problem was due to a feature which is enabled by default on WD drives: IntelliPark or SecurePark. after 8000ms (set by factory default) idle time the drives parks its heads to the secure-zone. WD state that it takes 'only' about a second to reactivate the drive from this idle mode. obviously scratch live doesn't access the drive that often (when audio cache is set to 60sec) or the drive's firmware has some kind of bug that it goes to idle mode way more often. another problem may occur after using the drive with it's factory default: it's mechanics aren't build for permanent parking/reactivating the heads. the load/unload cycle count on my drive has dropped from 100% to 98% (as shown by some SMART tools) in just 6 days!!! seems that the drive won't make it very long that way... be warned!
so i messed around with certain hd tuning tools but none changed results. forget them. after searching more i found that there is a little tool called WDIDLE3 inofficially released by Western Digital. it only works with WD drives, and annoyingly has to be runned from DOS. so you must have a floppy disk drive or you have to integrate the program (which is only a single .exe-file) into a bootable DOS image from which you burn a CD.

for the tool PM me or it can be currently downloaded here (found link on a german forum):

home.arcor.de

after connecting the disk to desktop-pc, starting DOS-boot-CD, then running A:\WDIDLE3 /D the idle-mode was disabled and scratch live is behaving again as it should :)

hope this would help some folks, I believe the new 640GB isn't the only drive with this problem...
nik39 4:01 AM - 3 December, 2009
Nice, good to know. Thanks for the post.
Arnie 3:12 PM - 12 December, 2010
Ah, very interesting! I had the exact same issue, but then with my fileserver (read on www.serato.com).

Do note that it's officially not allowed to redistribute. If you need the wdidle tool, you should get it from the WD site. More information can be found in this thread at WD:

community.wdc.com