Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought 2-3TB drives for my Synology NAS Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS212j (White). I've only had the drives on for one day but after reading about all the drives that fail after a few months it seems the problem is the head parking itself every 8 seconds if no disk activity. The only reason it does this is to try to save power. Each park results in a load/unload cycle. Most modern drives are rated around 600,000 cycles. Depending on how your system uses the drive, your drive should only have 10-200 cycles per day, but some these Western Digital drives are reporting 3000-5000 cycles per day. This will surpass the 600,000 cycle limit in a few months. You can get the cycles from S.M.A.R.T. or from third party software. Think of starting your car and turning if off every minute, 24 hours a day. Your starter would only last a month or so and then fail instead of lasting for years. The first thing I did with my new drives was to run the WDIDLE3.EXE utility on them to disable the 8 second head parking. You can also change the head parking to something like 5 minutes, which would make a lot more sense than 8 seconds. To use this utility, you have to run it from a boot disk at the command line. This means you have make a cd/dvd/floppy that you boot from and get a command line prompt such as A:\. At the A:\ prompt type in WDIDLE3 /r to get the current setting (mine said "Idle3 Timer is enabled and set to 8.000 seconds"). After I ran WDIDLE3 /d to disable the timer it said "Idle3 Timer is disabled." You could also run WDIDLE3 /S300 to set the park time to 5 minutes. I disabled mine because most, if not all, operating systems already have options to shut down hard drives after so many minutes. Google WDIDLE3 to research for yourself (one site is [...]). I don't think this utility is still supported, so use at your own risk. That said, I haven't read about any cases of this utility damaging hard drives. The hard part is making a boot disk with this utility on it and booting into it. I can't write up how to do this (do your google) but I will say on most machines you do not have to go into the bios and change your boot order. Just continuously press the F8 key (Windows) when booting and you should get a menu of which drive you want to boot from. In a last, unrelated note, it seems you can run these drives in RAID mode even though WD says you shouldn't and wants you to buy their Enterprise models that cost more. From my research, the TLER setting is only applicable to certain RAID configurations and then only if you have hardware controlling the RAID. Most consumers and small business will have RAID controlled in their software, so TLER should be off (as it is in these drives), but if you do have a hardware RAID controller you may want consider other drives that support TLER. If you want to try experimenting with the TLER settings, there is a WDTLER utility available. Finally, if anyone has corrections or additional information please leave a comment. Bert