WD Green - Do spindown settings persist after power cycle - DVR use

I'm considering a Western Digital Green drive for use in a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). This equipment does no power management itself, and won't set the drive to spin down.

I've experimented with a standard Seagate drive: by "hot plugging" the running drive into a PC, I can set the spindown setting, and then "hot plug" the unit back to the DVR. When the video recorder is in standby the drive spins down until the next scheduled recording . But the moment power is cycled, the setting is lost.

I understand that most SATA drives forget the spindown setting. However I understand the WDC Green might be different, and wonder if anyone can confirm. Will it spin down in my DVR?

-Bryce


Note 1: Specifically I power the drive from the DVR at all times, then hot-remove the SATA cable, hot plug into a PC running Linux, issue "hdparm -S1 /dev/sda", then hotplug back to the DVR. This fools the drive into thinking the S1 command came from the Digital Video Recorder.

Note 2: This is a Dish Network DTV Pal DVR (formerly the TR-50), and over-the-air, no-internet or monthly TiVo fee required, hard drive based video recorder which works like an extended version of a DTV converter box. It draws 22 Watts 24/7 with the stock drive, a 7200 RPM Seagate.

I'm sure that part is not true: the WD drive has tricky marketing wording. It has an "invariant spin speed", meaning fixed.
Sorry sub mesa: just like the Tom's hardware editor you've been taken in by the marketing fluff.
If you have such a drive though, you could answer the original question with an experiment.

The WD Green is ~5400rpm yes, not 5400rpm - 7200rpm like the marketing suggest, but that wasn't what i meant. The issue is that when the drive idles, it goes even lower power idle state; though not completely spun down like with a spindown command where it goes to 0rpm; any access would need 8 seconds or so to regain its spindle speed. The WD Green appears to use some built-in mechanism to reduce idle load even more; which can be measured with voltage meter as it uses more power directly after completing an I/O request than say 10 minutes later.

What the exact story is here i don't know, but it doesn't matter really the benefit is lower power consumption especially in idle mode which is most important. The drive will be significantly less hot and won't need active cooling.