WD "Green" HD causes few-seconds lockups after wake from sleep - how to disable auto-shutdown?

My desktop has a non-OS drive D: 2000MB WD Green (model WD20EARS-00MVWB0, firmware version 51.0AB51).

After the computer boots / wakes from sleep, in the first time I access D: drive, the program which accesses it (Explorer / etc.) locks up for several seconds. If the computer wakes up and there was some program accessing the drive (say, an Explorer window open), then the log-on screen will lockup for several seconds.

I presume the drive's firmware deliberately spins-up only on access, and I want to disable this behavior. I've found an Anandtech post that mentions WD's WDIDLE3.exe utility. However, this utility lists several 750-1000MB drive, with a stern warning not to use on any other drives. There's also idle3-tools, but that's only for Linux.

How can I disable this behavior through Windows?

OS: Windows 8 64-bit, though it happened with Windows XP as well.

Read through this WD forum thread and this WD Knowledge Base article carefully. The WD20EARS Green drive is supported by the WDIdle3 utility. I have used it myself from an MS-DOS/FreeDOS USB stick to change the idle timer, and I believe WDIDLE3 /D should disable the timer completely (or at least set it to its max supported value; check WDIDLE3 /? for all supported options).

Note: Although the operation should be safe (I ran it on a drive that was almost full), it's always a good idea to have a backup of your data before attempting something like this.

IIRC the "green" range can't have these features tweaked any more, thought the "black" (and perhaps also the "blue") ranges do - they are pretty much locked to the low-power settings.

Though this is 2nd-hand information as I bought different drives instead having found people discussing similar issues.