Seagate 4 TB NAS Drive Load Cycles

[crawfish]

I currently have the non-NAS ST4000DM000 in one system, and it audibly does a load / unload cycle every minute or so. It's highly annoying, and I would not tolerate it in a system I have to listen to all day. There is no new firmware to help, and Seagate apparently doesn't provide a tool like WDIDLE3, which I use to disable this behavior on my WD green drives.

I'm wondering if the more expensive NAS model ST4000VN000 does this head parking or not. Anyone know?

 

[mwroobel]

I remember reading some time ago that certain firmware revs of this drive (CC43 comes to mind) can mitigate the head park issues with a set of the proper word in APM.. Use something like HD Sentinel (Even the free version will work) to set APM to 128 for the drive and see if it makes any difference. YMMV, and it is not a persistent setting (hard power down will reset it to factory)

 

[tran1981]

Yes, APM for this drive is set at 128 by default. You can change it to 254 (Max) or disable it with 255. I disabled all my 4TBs APM with hdapm for my NAS linux and I can see load cycles slowed down significantly. Alternative you can disable with HD Sentinel for windows.