I buy a lot of refurbished PC's & some used, yet tough as nails WD RE4's, one of which was a 'GP' model, meaning 'Green Power'. Using the wdidle3 tool makes the RE4's with GP into a regular model, plus many of the drives I end up with (fortunately mostly WD's) has very high UCC stats, so I take no chance, run the tool on all. Some came to me with 8.5 to almost 10 years of powered on time usage, only one out of these had a low UCC (140 over 20K+ hours) & 40 of those were during my setting up Windows for the first time.
So whomever had that one drive must have rarely shut down the PC (or most likely server), otherwise unless using the wdidle3 utility, would had have many, many more. Since I disabled with wdidle3, the UCC is consistent with my boot cycles. This is the leading cause of drive failure, like some other mechanical & many electronics (take modems, routers & even some brands of light bulbs, running constant produces fewer issues than power on/off cycles (or start/stop).
I used the light bulb as one example, because out apartment's light bulbs has all been changed to quality corkscrew looking florescent ones, and all except one has been replaced more than once since initially installed. The only one that hasn't in in the combo kitchen/dining room & that light stays on 24/7, unless there's a power outage. Therefore, I don't see it as a fluke that we lucked out on the one bulb. Same with the previous router I installed, connected to a combo power strip/surge protector, and while in bed or gone, always flipped the switch to power down the router for security. The router was a well reviewed one & carried a 3 year warranty, yet didn't last a year with me turning on & off, it's replacement under RMA has lasted for almost 4 years & a recertified replacement.
Came to find out, routers tends to run longer with fewer temperature changes, while rebooting to flush old code is OK & good for maintaining speed, in 60 seconds doesn't get cold, same goes for modems & likely HDD's also. Therefore, all except two of my WD drives has had the wdidle3 utility ran & haven't had any issues, no weird noises, all is good. The two that I didn't run the utility on, first because new & with a 5 year warranty, are my 2TB WD Gold's. Instead of running wdidle3, I downloaded the HIPM/DIPM utility shown below (usually used to assist with battery life on notebooks). There are two registry entries in the zip file to merge, enable or disable & I chose to merge enable, there'll be a prompt that (in short words) may be harmful, it's not. In regards to OS version, this works with any version of Windows on an AHCI equipped MB, there are older versions of this article in regards to Windows 7 & Vista, as well as 8.1. As with any downloaded file, be sure to scan with any installed security for your personal safety.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/72971-add-ahci-link-power-management-power-options-windows-10-a.html
What this does (after merge) is creates an added entry in the Advanced power plan, have to open Power Options as shown in snapshot in above link & click 'Change Plan Settings', then 'Change advanced power settings' and then, under Hard Disk, HIPM/DIPM will be the first item seen under 'Hard Disk' (brand doesn't matter). Directly under 'AHCI Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM', there's 4-5 settings, just set to Active & then just below that, enter '0' & press Enter & click OK. Now reopen that same window & it should say 'Never' where the zero was entered, this has (near) the same effect as the wdidle3 utility & no need to risk voiding a warranty if one cannot figure out how to set wdidle3 back to default. BTW, I don't know how to reset to default myself, other than to lookup the drive & see the specs, or what the majority are posting on their forums for the out of the box timer. It may not be the same for every WD HDD, then again, it may be.
Note that if one changes power plans, the file may need to be reinstalled & go through the steps again, as seen, very simple to do, a computer literate 12 year old could perform this & physically one's not digging into the registry, although years back, had to. Many Windows tech forums shows the same trick, am sure there's Linux & Mac specific tasks which does the same.
So at least this gives both a safer option to wdidle3 & covers most all brands of drives and does hold down UCC values. If not, I'd know by now on the WD Gold drives I've had for roughly 6-8 months as of this date.
Cat
