WD Blue excessive spin-down

[tucansam]

While I'll likely not use it in my primary unraid server, I had considered using it in my secondary.  Buddy gave me a WD Blue 1TB 2.5" disk, WD10JPVX.  According to google, some of the MyBook drives have a very short spindown timeout built into the firmware.  This drive came out of an Acer laptop (one of the new ones that weighs nothing and whose CPU draws 7w, so I can see the spindown being useful, as the laptop's battery is the size of two Sharpie's layed together.....)

 

Problem is that it spins down every few seconds.  Literally.  I put it in an Ubuntu system to run smart, and it spun up with power, and immediately went sleep.  When I mounted it, it spun up again.  When I browsed its contents, is spun up again.  All in the time span that it took me to open terminal window and execute three commands from the shell.

 

I put it in a Windows machine, same thing.  Plugged it in (USB), it spun up.  Immediately opened diskpart to nuke it, it spun up.  Nuked it and formatted it, then copied a file over to it to test, and it spun up again to accept the file.  So its spinning down essentially immediately after completing a command or file operation.

 

Is there any way to modify the firmware to keep the disk spinning, at least for a time longer than the last command was sent to the drive?

 

Thanks.

[Squid]

2 hours ago, tucansam said:

While I'll likely not use it in my primary unraid server, I had considered using it in my secondary.  Buddy gave me a WD Blue 1TB 2.5" disk, WD10JPVX.  According to google, some of the MyBook drives have a very short spindown timeout built into the firmware.  This drive came out of an Acer laptop (one of the new ones that weighs nothing and whose CPU draws 7w, so I can see the spindown being useful, as the laptop's battery is the size of two Sharpie's layed together.....)

 

Problem is that it spins down every few seconds.  Literally.  I put it in an Ubuntu system to run smart, and it spun up with power, and immediately went sleep.  When I mounted it, it spun up again.  When I browsed its contents, is spun up again.  All in the time span that it took me to open terminal window and execute three commands from the shell.

 

I put it in a Windows machine, same thing.  Plugged it in (USB), it spun up.  Immediately opened diskpart to nuke it, it spun up.  Nuked it and formatted it, then copied a file over to it to test, and it spun up again to accept the file.  So its spinning down essentially immediately after completing a command or file operation.

 

Is there any way to modify the firmware to keep the disk spinning, at least for a time longer than the last command was sent to the drive?

 

Thanks.

Search google for WDIDLE