Disable head parking Western Digital drives
Most Western Digital hard drives’ firmware let the heads park themselves after
a certain amount of seconds in case the disk is not actively performing any
operation.
This might be useful to keep power consumption under control but is actually
harmful for disks that run 24/7 (WD Red for example).
Luckily there is a way to disable head parking, this can be done directly from
Linux using a tool called idle3ctl.
# Fedora
dnf install idle3-tools
# CentOS (gcc and make required)
# get source code from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/idle3-tools/
tar xzvf idle3-tools-0.9.1.tar.gz
cd idle3-tools-0.9.1
make
Now, identify the hard disk device using for example fdisk -l, once done run
the following command to completely disable head park.
# Fedora
sudo idle3ctl -d /dev/sd[X]
# CentOS
sudo ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sd[X]
Don’t forget to power off and on (reboot is not enough) the machine where the hard
disk is installed, otherwise the setting is not gonna be applied.
To check if head park has really been disabled use smartctl and check after a few
minutes if Load_Cycle_Count grew or not.
smartctl -A /dev/sd[X]