MODS: Green WD10EARS / WD20EARS Making "Clunk" Sound

I'm making this document since like you I use Western Digital Caviar Green drives in my network media tank (NMT) or network media jukebox (NMJ) and for data storage. Not only are these drives cool and quiet, they don't require as much power as performance drives. And the WD20EARS 2GB caviar green model just suits the storage requirement -- the price is just right -- it has double the capacity of the WD10EARS without having to pay twice its price. I use the same drives to store data on my desktop, not just the NMT.

But have you ever noticed your WD green drive make weird "clunk" noise(s)? This happens especially if you stepped away for a bit and grabbed a cup of coffee or prepped another bag of popcorn. Once you start browsing your selection of HD movies, the drive starts to spin up with a "clunk". Or try observing this on your computer, pause from work and listen to the drives for a while. Chances are you will hear the "clunk" and you will see (or perhaps hear) what I mean.

If this is not obvious to you with all the surround and Dolby digital sounds on the speakers or entertainment system, try plugging the drive to your computer directly and launch a hard drive utility capable of reading SMART (short for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) parameters off the disk, like below.

You will then notice the values for "Load Cycle Count" (LCC) have skyrocketed beyond your normal usage of the drive. This is most noticeable if the drive is relatively new. LCC for a storage drive that is a just week old should not exceed 1000. Going over that figure is just unusual. When you see these figures for yourself, a different realization starts to sink in. But don't fret, you did not buy a defective drive.

This is the default behavior of the WD green drives. Western Digital green EARS drives are known to park their heads every 8 seconds, if idle -- this is the "green thing" in the drive. Meaning, whenever the drives are idle and 8 seconds have elapsed, the drives park their heads and once the heads are parked, spin-up will cause the parameters to increase (and in turn decrease the future usability of the drive). The Load Cycle Count values skyrocket each time the device is used since they will be idle at some point.

Like me, you will want to change this behavior and Western Digital has provided the wdidle3 tool to override this default setting. Using wdidle3.exe, you can choose to completely disable the timing but that defeats the purpose of buying a green drive in the first place.

WDIDLE3 is a DOS utility, with The following set of arguments to be used (quoting the manual for wdidle3):

WDIDLE3 [/S[]] [/D] [/R] [/?]
/S[] Set timer, units in seconds. Default=8.0 (8.0 seconds).
            Resolution is 0.1 seconds from 8.0 to 12.7 seconds.
            Resolution is 30 seconds from 30 seconds to 300 seconds.
            Note, times between 12.8 and 30 seconds will be set to 30 seconds.
/D          Disable timer.
/R          Report current timer.
/?          This help info.

On my WD10EARS and WD20EARS drives, I ran wdidle3 as: wdidle3 /s300. Even though the tool is not certified for use with those drives, it ran successfully. And wdidle3 /r validated that the timing has been set to 300 seconds. With this, I modified the behavior of my WD10EARS and WD20EARS to park only if idle for 300 seconds. After which I plugged them on the desktop from time to time to observe the behavior of the Load Cycle Cound and the results are quite satisfactory -- not much increase unlike prior to the mod.

I have not taken any screenshots since I ran this tool in DOS mode, not inside the Windows environment. So I would strongly suggest not to run this on the Windows environment. Again, I would strongly suggest not to run this on the Windows environment, not even in safe-mode.

(DISCLAIMER: As always, do these things at your own risk. I cannot be held liable for bricking your drive due to performing this procedure.)

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MODS: Popcorn Hour C-200 (PCH-C200) Heatsink Mod

My Egreat EG-M31B broke down over a month ago. When powering it up all the LED indicators light up but there is no display on the TV. There isn't much I can do about it and the internet doesn't offer any help on the matter. Eventually, I simply replaced the media player. I got myself a Popcorn Hour C200.

The C200, they say, is one of the best players around. And I concur. But it does come with its set of downsides -- it becomes hot over time and it needs a better cooling system. A network media tank (NMT) this expensive should not be skimped out on components.

The OEM heatsink is too small. After an hour of using the NMT, put your hand over the top cover and you would notice it is warm to the touch. How much more the heatsink itself!

Fortunately, I still have a Zalman ZM-NBF47 fanless northbridge heatsink. So I thought it would serve the purpose quite well. But first I tried to search if this heatsink is compatible with the C200. My quest to find answers came out empty. So I could be the first to try it out, the guinea pig -- my C200.

After trying several positions in fitting the heatsink, my assumptiom was right. My efforts proved to be very fruitful! The ZM-NBF47 fit the C200 very well (see picure below).

Before permanently mounting the heatsink to the C200's board, I compared the original OEM heatsink with the NBF47. Snapshot posted below.

To further improve the cooling modifications on my C200, I equipped it with a 60mm fan. I took it from an old RedFox heatsink that I kept way back from the Pentium III days. It still works and being a 12V .20A fan, it is whisper quiet. Just plugged it to the fan header provisioned on the C200 board.

The mods on the C200 made it cooler now and the top cover is no longer warm to the touch even if used for hours on end.

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TWEAK: Enable Formatting Flash Drive to NTFS

As previously mentioned, Windows does not directly allow formatting USB flash drives (UFDs) to be formatted to NTFS. However, the utility diskpart makes this possible. And we also mentioned that using diskpart when there are multiple drives and UFDs makes the risk of losing data grow exponentially. Things can go wrong in many different ways and we need to mitigate that risk.

While it is not possible through the GUI at default settings, we can tweak the behavior of Windows to make the GUI allow us to format UFDs to NTFS. Follow the procedure along as we make tweaks to the handling of the USB drives.

Follow the below procedure to enable formatting to NTFS.

[1] Launch the Device Manager. Via start menu: Start -> Run -> devmgmt.msc -> OK. If via the control panel, Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management. Then click on the Device Manager.

[2] Then open the Disk Drives by clicking the "+" before it. You will be having a window similar to the screenshot below.

[3] Right-click on the UFD you want to format. And select Properties.

[4] On the device properties window, go to the Policies tab. Change the Removal policy to Better performance. And click OK to close all open windows.

[5] Launch Windows Explorer, right-click on the drive assignment of the UFD and select Format... You will now notice that the Format utility can format the UFD to NTFS.

[6] Go ahead and format the UFD.

This way of formatting UFDs to NTFS is safer and doesn't have the same level of risk as when using diskpart. You can select the proper drive to format and won't easily commit the mistake of accidentally formatting another drive or UFD. Not only that, the risk of losing important, critical data is avoided.

But then again, whichever way is easier and works for you remains your judgment call.

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HOW-TO: Format USB Flash Drives to NTFS

By default, Windows doesn't allow USB flash drives (in this document we will shorten its name to UFD) to be formated to NTFS. I'm quite puzzled by this myself but as this is the default behavior, you will need to discover and study a bit more in order to get the functionality you require. Further research brought the realization that this limitation only exists on the GUI. If you are used to the *nix systems command line coding, this will suit your taste quite well.

Diskpart is an integral part of Windows, a command line utility to partition disks -- quite similar to fdisk of the Linux world. While this is not a full-blown command-line coding like *nix, it is a bit similar in a sense. Enough talk.. on to the meaty details of diskpart.

Plug the UFD on an available USB port and launch "cmd.exe" as Administrator. You will know that the command tool ran as Administrator due to the "Administrator" tag on the upper left corner of the window (see below).

The procedure below should be done on the cmd.exe window as posted above. The "DISKPART>" prompt is provided for illustration purposes to show that the commands used need to be executed inside th diskpart shell (in performing the procedure, skip the "DISKPART>" portion when copying and pasting).

[1] Launch diskpart. On the command tool key-in "diskpart" (or "diskpart.exe").

[2] On the diskpart prompt, key in "DISKPART> list disk". The last one should be the UFD. You may also check the size column just to be sure. Then select that disk by "DISKPART> select disk 1". If you have many disks select the appropriate number "disk X", where X is the disk number.

[3*] (optional) You may choose to clean the disk partitioning information using "DISKPART> clean". This will delete everything in the drive so be careful! A prompt of successful cleaning will follow.

[4*] If you skipped STEP#3 above, you already have a partition on the UFD. Create a partition on the disk. Use command "DISKPART> create partition primary". Verify that a primary partition exists using "DISKPART> list partition".

[5] Then select the newly created partition using "select primary 1".

[6] Mark the partition active through command "DISKPART> active". When you list the partitions, the "*" (asterisk) before the partition number indicates that the partition is active.

[7] Format the UFD, "DISKPART> format fs=ntfs" or "DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick".

[8*] (optional) If you wish to assign a drive letter to the UFD, use "DISKPART> assign".

[9] Exit the diskpart utility. "DISKPART> exit".

Yes, the command line utility is really cool. It can give you the flexibility you need if the GUI doesn't give room for it.

Typing the commands above can be excruciating and tiring if you're not used to it. Don't worry about this though as you can shorten the commands. You may key-in the first three letters of the command.

For example, instead of "DISKPART> list partition" you may use "DISKPART> lis par". The commands execute the same set of instructions and is less of a hassle to type.

To get a better explanation of what a particular command does, you can always use help (DISKPART> help select).

This procedure is easy to execute on a computer system with only a system drive and UFD. On a system with multiple disks and UFDs this can be really risky.

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FAQ: Locate's Equivalent Command in AIX

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.

Q. Just recently I asked a colleague (whom I consider to be a guru of AIX) what the equivalent of the Linux command locate is on this particular operating system. The equivalent Linux and Solaris commands are previously documented here.

A. Unfortunately, his answer was there is none. But the discussion did not end there. He suggested that I use another command that has a similar function and is quite as flexible as locate.

The commands is whereis (and which_fileset). And this whereis is part of the package bos.rte.commands and bos.compat.links. To determine if whereis is installed on the machine, check as outlined below:

On AIX 5.3:

user@host => which_fileset whereis
/usr/ucb/whereis -> /usr/bin/whereis    bos.compat.links 5.3.0.0
/usr/bin/whereis                        bos.rte.commands 5.3.0.0

On AIX 6.1:

user@host => which_fileset whereis
/usr/ucb/whereis -> /usr/bin/whereis    bos.compat.links 6.1.0.0
/usr/bin/whereis                        bos.rte.commands 6.1.0.0

The above command is dependent on another package and without that there will be errors as outlined below.

user@host => which_fileset whereis
The /usr/lpp/bos/AIX_file_list file does not exist.
Please install the "bos.content_list" fileset
and try the "which_fileset" command again.

When all is well. Try it out:

user@host => whereis hosts
hosts: /etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.deny /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak /usr/share/man/man5/hosts.5.gz

Did I mention the same command works for Solaris and Linux? It does (given the dependent packages are installed), so add this option on those operating systems too!

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