# Why is WDIDLE necessary on Tivo?



## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

I know the need for WDIDLE on WD Green drives is an established fact for other computer applications (e.g.: server arrays) but I'm having a difficult time understanding why it is needed for Tivos. From what I gather, the default setting of the idle time is 8 seconds. Doesn't the Tivo 30 minute live TV buffer write to the drive more often than that? If so, why would the drive ever go idle?


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## dwit (May 5, 2004)

Tivo is effected only because of the possibly longer idle time during Tivo warm(soft) reboot.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

dwit said:


> Tivo is effected only because of the possibly longer idle time during Tivo warm(soft) reboot.


Does that cause boot problems or does it just add a bunch of cycle counts?


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## dwit (May 5, 2004)

lillevig said:


> Does that cause boot problems or does it just add a bunch of cycle counts?


It causes the Tivo to not soft reboot, and just hang on the Welcome screen on the occasions a soft boot is called for. There are some rare occasions(service updates, CDE if I'm not mistaken, etc) where an automatic soft reboot is called for. And then there are those times when we desire, or are required, to do a soft reboot via the menu.

As mentioned, if the intellipark has not been effectively disabled, the Tivo will hang in "Welcome" until a cold reboot is applied, by cutting and restoring the power.


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## MeInDallas (Jul 31, 2011)

And trust me it does hang. I upgraded one of mine and didnt WDIDLE3 the drive and had to take the drive back out and do it 

It's very easy to do though, very easy.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lillevig said:


> I know the need for WDIDLE on WD Green drives is an established fact for other computer applications (e.g.: server arrays) but I'm having a difficult time understanding why it is needed for Tivos. From what I gather, the default setting of the idle time is 8 seconds. Doesn't the Tivo 30 minute live TV buffer write to the drive more often than that? If so, why would the drive ever go idle?


When a TiVo does a soft reboot, it stops talking to the hard drive for a while.

A drive with intellipark will notice that this lack of communication has exceeded its threshold and park the heads.

When the soft-rebooting TiVo gets to the part where it goes to talk to the drive again, the drive isn't ready to give it the response the TiVo's looking for, the TiVo decides it isn't getting through to the drive and re-soft-reboots, which gives the drive time to decide it should park the heads again, lather, rinse, repeat.

wdidle3 allows you to either disable intellipark or set the timeout period so high that it amounts to the same thing.

In some cases telling it to disable intellipark doesn't actually get it disabled but gets the time period set to a whole bunch of minutes, maybe even over an hour, and that amounts to the same thing as far as the TiVo soft re-boot process is concerned.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Thanks for the info dwit and unitron. I figured there must be some reason it needed to be done on Tivos but I like to understand why instead of just accepting the prevailing practices.


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## Stuxnet (Feb 9, 2011)

Yet not all WD green drives exhibit that behavior. For example most, though not all EARS require resetting. The problem is that we can't reliably predict which ones need the Intellipark setting changed. You can go without, but you risk MeInDallas' experience.


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## rkshack (May 6, 2002)

I am tryin to upgrade a series 3 that was rebooting. I backed up the orginal drive and restored to a wd5000azdx. When I try to boot I only get two the initial welcome screen. I saw somewhere this could be improved by wdidle. Anyone know if this could be related. I am starting up with a cold boot.

rkshack


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

rkshack said:


> I am tryin to upgrade a series 3 that was rebooting. I backed up the orginal drive and restored to a wd5000azdx. When I try to boot I only get two the initial welcome screen. I saw somewhere this could be improved by wdidle. Anyone know if this could be related. I am starting up with a cold boot.
> 
> rkshack


If it's a WD Caviar Green, you should run

wdidle3

to disable Intellipark or set the timer to something very high like 300 seconds (5 minutes)

However, it seems this is one of the newer models (6Gb/s) and it's starting to look like the newer models and TiVos just don't get along.

(It also looks like the prices being asked for it are nearly what you could get a 1TB drive for)

Does it have a jumper setting that'll let you force it back down to 3Gb/s?


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