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HDD power usage

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Hi guys, i have a few questions regarding hard disk power management.

First one, i recently brought a WD20EARS HD, and having heard of problems with them i looked into my nubers in smart, and after about a month i have a load cycle count of 106 and power on hours of 707. Now i see i don;t have a problem like other people, but i decided to investigate anyway and i found that the IDLE3 mode was off by default!
I also looked at my power options in windows, and for some reason i had the HDDs set to never sleep.

Since then i have change the sleep timer to 20mins and i am considering turning on the IDLE 3 timer on the WD20EARS to something like 150s.

How does this sound? would there actually be any considerable power savings? Should i change the HDD sleep time lower? Does the sleep function in windows stop all power draw from HDD's?

I found this site http://www.silentpcreview.com/article909-page2.html in a previous thread, so i'm estimating my HDDs would use 30-40w, but if i could reduce that i'd be happy as i like to have my pc on 24/7
 
Interesting.
I bought the same HDD maybe less than a month ago.
Either your HDD is a returned job or WD have decided to go with whats been said and disable idile3 by default.

Here's a pic of mine in HDTUNE
WD20EARS A.jpg

As you can see it definitely has idle3 on.
 
i'm pretty sure it wasn't a returned job. i looked at the smart a few days after buying and there were only a few hrs of use on it. It had
Power On Hours Count: 286
Load Cycle Count: 40
2 or 3 weeks after buying. I also tried to put the idle3 mode on (but for a time of 300s) but it wouldn't accept the command. The only way i could get it to turn on was to use no time then it automatically set it to 8.0 seconds.
 
I do recall reading somewhere another person had received a WD20EARS with intellipark disabled.
Don't recall the specifics of it though.

As for power savings, we can agree the green power will be more power conservative than the other WD drives.
Even more so for you since you activated idle3 as it should have been when you purchased the drive.
 
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