question about hdd firmware

[d3athf1sh]

so here's my issue, a while back a buddy of mine gave me an old WD "my book" external hard drive 500GB. So i shucked it just to use as a regular hard drive because i have an external "swappable" usb hard drive adapter, that with other drives works as expected, but that one shucked drive, whenever i use it, if it's not actively doing something it'll totally disconnect from the system, not just spindown but i get the disconnect sound and everything. i have a few loose drives i use for backing stuff up or moving stuff around and/or torrenting.

but i guess the main thing i'm asking is if they use a different firmware for those "My Book" drives that's possibly used as a deterrent for shuckers? because that was a big thing at one point because it was cheaper to buy those "my book's" and shuck them than buying a loose drive. i mean it just looking at it, it looks like a standard wd blue 500GB. it's just really annoying to use, like just now i was listening to a grateful dead show and i know one of the tracks was like over 20min but it just disconnected mid song!!? like i was saying before, usually as long as i was using it, e.g. active torrent, watching movie, listening to music. it would stay on and only disconnect if not being used for a while, probably at the point where most drives would just spin down. i guess it wouldn't really change anything because it's not like there's ever HDD firmware updates. at least that i've ever seen. it's just weird, any thoughts?

 

[Dopamin3]

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/

That wdidle3 utility should work, load it up on a DOS bootable and do "wdidle3 /d" and it should prevent it from disconnecting. IntelliPark was often used on those drives and would park read/write heads after as little as 8 seconds. WD stopped providing that utility but it's attached there and also lots of good discussion. Just double check your drive model will work with it, but I'm betting it should.

 

[pendragon1]

my mybook wasnt shuckable either. try that^^^ but you could be sol.

 

[mwroobel]

With spinners (in general)... Unless you are sure that an upgraded firmware will fix your particular problem, it is likely not worth your time. Most of the firmware upgrades are locked to specific models. Even if you can hack your way around the locks (or want to delve into the world of TTL to serial adapters and roll your own) there is no guarantee that it will fix anything, or not make other things worse. Also, if you have a drive that is randomly disconnecting, that is the last device I would want to try and flash. If you don't care, then F it, have a ball go down the rabbit hole and be [H]!

 

[d3athf1sh]

With spinners (in general)... Unless you are sure that an upgraded firmware will fix your particular problem, it is likely not worth your time. Most of the firmware upgrades are locked to specific models. Even if you can hack your way around the locks (or want to delve into the world of TTL to serial adapters and roll your own) there is no guarantee that it will fix anything, or not make other things worse. Also, if you have a drive that is randomly disconnecting, that is the last device I would want to try and flash. If you don't care, then F it, have a ball go down the rabbit hole and be [H]!

yeah i plan on giving that fix dopamin3 was talking about a shot. i'm just assuming it needs to be hooked up directly to the mobo which means i'm gonna have to unhook everything and pull my case out of the corner so i can work on it. but reading up on it, it's usually a problem with the xxxx-EAVS and -EARS drives and the one i've got is an -AAKS and 7200rpm surprisingly being it came out of a my book so not sure if it's gonna fix it but they could have set the flag on it being it WAS a my book drive, so who knows. when i get the time to do it i'll update the thread and let yall know if it worked.