how can i disable continuously parking heads ?

I have a drive from WD and i can't change the APM level, it's greyed out in Crystal Disk Info
So it spins down after 15 min. of inactivity. But if i set the refresh-interval of CDI below that value it basically never spins down.
Each S.M.A.R.T.-Access = Read Access.
In your case, if you don't want your drive to sleep after 3 min., set the refresh-interval of CDI for this drive to 1 min. Or at least below 3 min.

 

hi have you tried hard disk sentinel ?
i have used it and it's the best , if it doesn't work just email to the developer ,he will answer after few hours and fix with an update
he did it for me

 

On some drives is impossible to turn off the APM.
Just set the APM between 80 and FE (hexadecimal values) or 128 and 254 (decimal values). In this range the disk never goes in standby mode

Panagiotis

 

hi Panagiotis , good point , some release firmware , but i will never update an hard disk firmware , ssd are different , but i have never seen hard disk firmware update
concluded successfully , they become all bulky paper stops
but i will give to hard disk sentinel a try

 

Correct. Or on some drives it can be changed, but after the drive is reconnected the APM Value is "resetted" to a default-value.

 

I missed that about the refresh level. That works too for my drive.

 

I tried all that, none of this helps on the Toshiba. It's either CDI refresh interval or KeepAliveHD so far.

 

No. I did not want to buy a license to solve this problem.

 

Interestingly my reason for doing this is to prevent the latency associated with moving a head from its parked position to active position.

I put in a 2.5 inch WD Drive into my set top box, and noticed there was a pause associated with a click type sound from the drive when initiating a playback of a recorded program. Bit of diagnosis discovered it was related to the parking of the drive head. I disabled it via the idle3ctl tool and all is good.

However I also have a Samsung (seagate) M9T drive I want to put into my ps4 pro which has the same horrible feature, I dont think its quite as aggressive but it does park its head. However it seems on these drives it can only be adjusted via a tool that can edit the APM flags live like you guys did, but not stored as a drive firmware setting, given the PS4 has no APM controls then I wont be able to do this in the PS4.

In a test in 12 hour period it has parked 40 times, which suggests it may not be anywhere near as the 8 sec parking setting of WD drives. Also apparently sony's OS disables APM when in games so I may be ok anyway.