Intellipark is only found on WD "Green" drives, and sometimes it comes from the factory enabled and sometimes it comes from the factory disabled.

There are two ways to use the

wdidle3.exe

utility to disable Intellipark, either actually disabling it or setting the timer period to something like 300 seconds (5 minutes), so that it'll never be powered but otherwise idle long enough for Intellipark to kick in.

When a TiVo reboots itself, it stops talking to the hard drive for a number of seconds.

If the hard drive has Intellipark enabled and the timer period is short enough, the drive will have gone to sleep because of lack of activity on the data wires, and when the TiVo calls on it, it won't get an immediate answer, so the "warm" boot fails.

TiVos don't reboot themselves often, but it does happen, like when a software update is pushed to them, and it has been reported that disabling Intellipark fixed a cold boot problem with a WD Green being used to upgrade a TiVo also.

Since you should take any new, or new to you, hard drive, connect it directly to a PC motherboard (I think some Apple boards can also handle this part if booted from a cd), boot with a cd with the manufacturer's diagnostic software on it and run the long test before putting it into service, you can run

wdidle3.exe

right after it passes the long test, assuming it's a WD Green of some sort.

Otherwise, you still needed to do the long test.

If the drive is already in the TiVo and working, leave it be, but make yourself a copy of The Ultimate Boot CD--it has

wdidle3.exe

and drive diagnostic software from just about all of the manufacturers, as well as a bunch of other stuff that may come in handy some day.

Then, if you ever have to open the TiVo back up for whatever reason, you can check to see if Intellipark is enabled and disable it if it is.

 

Intellipark is only found on WD "Green" drives <snip>

Not true. It is present on my WD Blue & WD Scorpio Blue 2.5" notebook drives, and I just tweaked it to 300 seconds instead of the minimal value it was set to.

That alone didn't help (much), due to the APM feature being set to park the heads as often as possible (without having different values for being on AC power, just for battery life). I'm using hdparm for Windows to take back control of that part of it, and I am pleased with it (other than having to manually re-set it every time my computer hibernates or sleeps, while I do have a startup entry for reboots and power cycles).

Intellipark is also present of each and every (current) WD Red NAS drive, but WD is currently shipping them with it disabled (like they are also doing with AV-GP drives now, but didn't early-on).

Maybe you meant to say "Intellipark is only found enabled on GP/Green drives not rated for 24/7 operation", perhaps...

 

Not true. It is present on my WD Blue & WD Scorpio Blue 2.5" notebook drives, and I just tweaked it to 300 seconds instead of the minimal value it was set to.

That alone didn't help (much), due to the APM feature being set to park the heads as often as possible (without having different values for being on AC power, just for battery life). I'm using hdparm for Windows to take back control of that part of it, and I am pleased with it (other than having to manually re-set it every time my computer hibernates or sleeps, while I do have a startup entry for reboots and power cycles).

Intellipark is also present of each and every (current) WD Red NAS drive, but WD is currently shipping them with it disabled (like they are also doing with AV-GP drives now, but didn't early-on).

Maybe you meant to say "Intellipark is only found enabled on GP/Green drives not rated for 24/7 operation", perhaps...

How long ago did you acquire those 2 drives?

 

Many of us have to reboot our Tivo's a lot more frequently than just when software updates are pushed. I probably average once every 2 or 3 weeks just due to Tuning Adapter glitches (e.g., losing SDV channels or failure of the Sub Expires date to update automatically) on TWC.

 

Thanks all. I'm confident that WD has the Intellipark feature disabled in their AV drives.

 

Thanks all. I'm confident that WD has the Intellipark feature disabled in their AV drives.

Apparently they do on the ones manufactured more recently, so if you got one made in the last year or so you're probably okay.

 

How long ago did you acquire those 2 drives?

About 3 months ago on the 3.5" WD Red NAS drives (for my TiVo base Roamios, and for my desktop & NAS usage).

The 2.5" WD Scorpio blues in my laptops and the WD Blues in my WDTV Live Hubs are less than a year old (one is about 6 months old). I find it amusing that WD didn't use AV-GP drives in their own AV-intensive Live Hub products (the ones which come with internal drives)...

I know WD changed whether or not Intellipark is enabled on AV-GP drives (used to ship enabled, but started shipping disabled a while back).

So, that being said, I guess it may depend on when the drive was manufactured, and how they set the firmware options at the time.

The WD Red NAS drives are very reliable, with no DOAs.

The 2.5" WD Blue & Scorpio Blue drives only last a year, or less, before they die, and it's usually shortly after the park cycle value in SMART counts down to "1".

I guess I'll have to admit it is a YMMV situation, and I should have included that in my prior post.

 

Apparently they do on the ones manufactured more recently, so if you got one made in the last year or so you're probably okay.

Just last weekend, I successfully installed a "new" WD10EURX in my TiVo HD XL. I say "new" (quotation marks) because the replacement HD was manufactured in May 2013.

About 1.5 years ago, the hard drive in my TiVo HD XL started to make a loud whining sound; I'd come home from work, or wake up in the morning, and the TiVo would be making this gawd-awful racket. Unplugging the TiVo and then immediately plugging it back in would not fix the problem. However, if I left the TiVo unplugged for an extended time (~ 1 day), the TiVo would boot with the hard drive running quietly again (probably a thermal issue with the hard-drive bearings?). This was becoming common enough that about a year ago, I decided to swap out the original hard drive with a new one. Of course, upon buying the new hard drive - a WD10EURX supposedly optimized for AV applications - the TiVo started running quietly again. A year went by, and things continued to run smoothly.

Finally, I started noticing that the TiVo's hard drive (still the original one) was making a quiet but noticeable noise while running that didn't go away after leaving the unit unpowered for a day. Thus, I decided the time had come to replace the original hard drive.

I had read a fair amount about the various methods and concerns surrounding the replacement of a TiVo's hard drive. There was (and is) a fair amount of conflicting and confusing information out there, by the way.

For one, I had seen lots of references to "Intellipark" and WD green drives. Therefore, I made a boot disk for wdidle3.exe and checked out my new WD10EURX before doing anything else. The result was that wdidle3 reported that the timer of the WD10EURX was disabled in its as-delivered state. BTW, when I tried to learn more about the new hard drive using wdidle3 (by using "/r"), wdidle3 was unable to read the hard drive. In fact, wdidle3 would run supposedly correctly ONCE, which was right after booting. After that, there was no response. But, the initial report was always the same: "Timer is Disabled."

I had also heard about Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM), but Hitachi Feature Tool said that AAM was unavailable on the WD10EURX.

I used WinMFS to make a clone of my original TiVo hard drive (also a WD AV hard drive!), installed the new hard drive, and the TiVo booted right away. I was rather disconcerted at first boot with the new hard drive because the new hard drive made one helluva racket when the TiVo powered up. It sounded like the hard drive was running at full tilt and then some. The sound continued well after bootup had successfully completed, gradually dying away as though the disks were slowing down. The sound eventually went away (after ~ 20 mins), and now the hard drive runs without a sound. Very strange (to me, at least). I have not tried to re-boot my TiVo since then, although since everything was retained in the transfer (licenses, old recordings, previous settings, etc.) I have the tendency to believe that the booting process should work as-intended.

So, to summarize: my WD10EURX manufactured in May 2013 did NOT ship with Intellipark enabled. It also does NOT have AAM-tuning capability.

Finally, while this is off from the original topic, I have to say: I bought a copy of InstantCake, and this proved completely useless. I spent hours trying all of the tricks I found here and elsewhere, and the inability of Instant Cake to deal with SATA drives rendered all of my efforts useless. For that matter, MFSLive was equally uncooperative as well. In a way I'm glad for this, because Instant Cake's and MFSLive's refusing to work caused me to try WinMFS, and this worked like a charm - doubly so, because WinMFS made it very easy to clone my original hard drive, so that there was no need to re-configure my TiVo after the swapping of hard drives. It was about as close to true UPnP as I could've hoped.

EDIT (9-JUN-2014): I have restarted my TiVo several times now after installing the replacement hard drive, and everything booted perfectly, which some authors have said doesn't happen if the hard drive has Intellipark enabled. One author has stated that having Intellipark disabled will somehow make the drive respond slower and slower as time goes on. While it's still early to say unequivocally, data transfer does not appear to have slowed one bit.

BTW, I should address the fact that some readers may wonder if I considered that the whining noise was from the fan and not the hard drive. I did indeed consider this, which is why I replaced the fan first (with one from Weaknees) before messing with the hard drive. However, after a couple days with the new fan I put the old fan back in, because the old fan is quieter than the new one!