I have a WD Elements Portable 500GB disk, model WDBAAR5000ABK-00. It parks the heads only a few seconds after the last access, which results in several seconds delay when the drive is accessed again. This is irritating in Windows, but seems to be actually causing problems when the disk is accessed after booting the PC with a bootable DOS diskette, by programs to backup the MBR and/or display the partition table.
I have seen several forum posts about this problem for other WD disks, but none for my model disk. I have seen WD programs wdidle3 and wdidledisable mentioned, but the descriptions for these programs say that they are only applicable to particular disks, my model disk is not listed for either program, and there are warnings about not using them for other disks.
Is there some other way to increase the time before the heads are parked?
