WD Scorpio: disable power management?

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:51 pm

I recently switched from two 3.5" disks to 2 2.5" disks, and the change in acoustics is wonderful.

I have a Hitachi 7K100, and a WD Scorpio. Using Hitachi Feature Tool I was easily able to disable the Hitachi's power management, so it won't spin down anymore (windows is constantly accessing the drive, and this can't be a good combination). The Scorpio however, although it isn't my OS drive, I haven't been able to switch to an always-on state. The Hitachi tool simply won't work with it. I've looked on WD's website, but haven't been able to find a tool similar to Hitachi's, but designed for WD's. Is there such a tool? If so, can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:10 am

not sure if this is the same thing or not..... but.

in winxp, right click on the desktop, properties. screen saver tab, power button, power schemes tab.

"turn off hard disks: (Never)" is what i have it set to.

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 7:09 pm

Not the same thing, unfortunately. It's firmware in all 2.5" drives that causes this. It's not really that big an issue because it's not my OS drive, but I'd still like to disable the automatic spindown.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 4:50 am

hdparm windows port! stopping, APM, AAM ... also IIRC WD issued a firmware patch for Scorpio, search "Scorpio clicking".

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 6:00 am

Thanks for the information Jaganath!

I searched for Scorpio clicking and all I could find were old threads (2005). My Scorpio is the 160GB version and is only a few months old. I should be able to assume it's preloaded with a newer firmware than one from 2005?

It's quite an annoying sound, really, for an otherwise silent drive.

Elliot · Post by **Elliot** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 4:02 pm

I'm using Scorpio as my primary desktop system drive. Model: WD1200VE (120GB/IDE). I was able to disable the APM using hdparm:

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

I had to reboot the machine in order to see the new APM setting reported by DTerm.

That said... I'm not at all convinced that disabling APM is a good idea. I'm running XP without a pagefile. All non-essential services are disabled. When PC is idle, I don't see much disk activity in the Task Manager. Occasional I/O Reads by csrss.exe and that's it.

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 7:36 pm

Thanks for your reply Elliot, I've been messing around with hdparm and some other programs as well and haven't been able to fix it. My Scorpio has developed an annoying clicking sound that I think is related to APM. I just want to disable it to see if it'll go away!

line · Post by **line** » Thu Jul 26, 2007 3:58 am

Moogles have you been able to solve it yet?

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Thu Jul 26, 2007 3:25 pm

No I gave up after having tried several different programs. Best ones appear to be hdparm and HDDScan, but neither managed to update the firmware permanently. I could use hdparm and disable automated power management, but the drive's settings would return to default after a reboot.

It's a moot point now for me though, because both drives are enclosed in Scythe 2.5" enclosures, and I can never, ever, hear them. Hitachi feature tool managed to disable (well sort of, it only allowed APM to be set to 254, and 255 is totally off) my 7K100's APM, which is my OS drive, so I'm assuming the drives should last a while.