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WD Black
I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives.
On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. |
#2
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WD Black
On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:16:32 -0400, philo wrote:
I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives. On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. If it's a recent drive, it may be using the inferior Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. See https://www.extremetech.com/computin...drives-use-smr for a list of which drives use the lower performance recording method. Regards, Dave Hodgins -- Change to for email replies. |
#3
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WD Black
On 6/26/2020 4:40 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote:
On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:16:32 -0400, philo wrote: I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives. On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. If it's a recent drive, it may be using the inferior Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. See https://www.extremetech.com/computin...drives-use-smr for a list of which drives use the lower performance recording method. Regards, Dave Hodgins Thanks, but my two drives are the CMR type At any rate, I think I will keep them just for backups |
#4
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WD Black
philo wrote:
On 6/26/2020 4:40 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote: On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:16:32 -0400, philo wrote: I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives. On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. If it's a recent drive, it may be using the inferior Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. See https://www.extremetech.com/computin...drives-use-smr for a list of which drives use the lower performance recording method. Regards, Dave Hodgins Thanks, but my two drives are the CMR type At any rate, I think I will keep them just for backups Using the available test utility from WDC, do the short and the long test. I'm not particularly interested in the results, just interested that, as a side-effect of running the external utility, the internal short and/or long testing, stops... To find the utility, sometimes they make you hunt down the drive model number first, then the download table shows a test utility. A modern hard drive *can* have sustained internal activity, combined with a refusal to respond from the outside. This happens with "secure erase" or "enhanced secure erase" commands being issued. Normal software doesn't use those, and stuff like the CMRR utility could do it. The symptoms do not sound like a match for that one. I'm not aware of any other patterns that can be produced inside. There's no "wear leveling" in a hard drive. There are little test routines that drives use, but what the output of those would be, to the user, is a mystery. Like, if an internal short test fails, how does the drive tell you that, exactly ? Normally, the information would only be imparted, if an external utility commanded it, and the status that comes back tells you the result. One IBM drive used to self-test, every 71 seconds, and it was accompanied by a "screeching sound", since the test pattern caused seeks at high speed. That might have been on a 15K drive. It made the drive only suitable for locked server rooms, as no human could put up with such a noise inside a house or apartment. But again, to what purpose ? How does the drive tell you that something is wrong ? It can piggyback a sense code onto some unassuming SCSI command, but with SATA I don't know if the interface logically supports that sort of thing. Paul |
#5
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WD Black
On 6/26/20 5:05 PM, Paul wrote:
philo wrote: On 6/26/2020 4:40 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote: On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:16:32 -0400, philo wrote: I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives. On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. If it's a recent drive, it may be using the inferior Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. See https://www.extremetech.com/computin...drives-use-smr for a list of which drives use the lower performance recording method. Regards, Dave Hodgins Thanks, but my two drives are the CMR type At any rate, I think I will keep them just for backups Using the available test utility from WDC, do the short and the long test. I'm not particularly interested in the results, just interested that, as a side-effect of running the external utility, the internal short and/or long testing, stops... To find the utility, sometimes they make you hunt down the drive model number first, then the download table shows a test utility. A modern hard drive *can* have sustained internal activity, combined with a refusal to respond from the outside. This happens with "secure erase" or "enhanced secure erase" commands being issued. Normal software doesn't use those, and stuff like the CMRR utility could do it. The symptoms do not sound like a match for that one. I'm not aware of any other patterns that can be produced inside. There's no "wear leveling" in a hard drive. There are little test routines that drives use, but what the output of those would be, to the user, is a mystery. Like, if an internal short test fails, how does the drive tell you that, exactly ? Normally, the information would only be imparted, if an external utility commanded it, and the status that comes back tells you the result. One IBM drive used to self-test, every 71 seconds, and it was accompanied by a "screeching sound", since the test pattern caused seeks at high speed. That might have been on a 15K drive. It made the drive only suitable for locked server rooms, as no human could put up with such a noise inside a house or apartment. But again, to what purpose ? How does the drive tell you that something is wrong ? It can piggyback a sense code onto some unassuming SCSI command, but with SATA I don't know if the interface logically supports that sort of thing. Â*Â* Paul Thanks Paul. For now I have the drives put away. Will run some tests on them next time I get a chance. Looking to the future though, I'll be moving everything to SSD. Seems like only yesterday I upgraded from an 850 meg drive to a 2 Gig. I was so nervous, I broke out into a cold sweat! |
#6
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WD Black
philo wrote:
On 6/26/20 5:05 PM, Paul wrote: philo wrote: On 6/26/2020 4:40 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote: On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:16:32 -0400, philo wrote: I'm wondering if there are performance issues with WD- Black hard drives. On one of my Wife's Win10 machine, there was constant disk activity that I could not trace down...all seemed normal. I decided to clone the drive to a SSD and found a nice improvement that I thought was simply a function of the SSD. Then realized that on my main machine running Ubuntu 20.04 that also had a WD-Black drive, there also seemed to be excess drive activity. Since I have not done a disk clone backup in years, I cloned the drive to a Seagate SATA and found the excess drive activity had been cured. At the time I purchased the WD-Black, I thought I was getting a top of the line drive. If it's a recent drive, it may be using the inferior Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. See https://www.extremetech.com/computin...drives-use-smr for a list of which drives use the lower performance recording method. Regards, Dave Hodgins Thanks, but my two drives are the CMR type At any rate, I think I will keep them just for backups Using the available test utility from WDC, do the short and the long test. I'm not particularly interested in the results, just interested that, as a side-effect of running the external utility, the internal short and/or long testing, stops... To find the utility, sometimes they make you hunt down the drive model number first, then the download table shows a test utility. A modern hard drive *can* have sustained internal activity, combined with a refusal to respond from the outside. This happens with "secure erase" or "enhanced secure erase" commands being issued. Normal software doesn't use those, and stuff like the CMRR utility could do it. The symptoms do not sound like a match for that one. I'm not aware of any other patterns that can be produced inside. There's no "wear leveling" in a hard drive. There are little test routines that drives use, but what the output of those would be, to the user, is a mystery. Like, if an internal short test fails, how does the drive tell you that, exactly ? Normally, the information would only be imparted, if an external utility commanded it, and the status that comes back tells you the result. One IBM drive used to self-test, every 71 seconds, and it was accompanied by a "screeching sound", since the test pattern caused seeks at high speed. That might have been on a 15K drive. It made the drive only suitable for locked server rooms, as no human could put up with such a noise inside a house or apartment. But again, to what purpose ? How does the drive tell you that something is wrong ? It can piggyback a sense code onto some unassuming SCSI command, but with SATA I don't know if the interface logically supports that sort of thing. Paul Thanks Paul. For now I have the drives put away. Will run some tests on them next time I get a chance. Looking to the future though, I'll be moving everything to SSD. Seems like only yesterday I upgraded from an 850 meg drive to a 2 Gig. I was so nervous, I broke out into a cold sweat! Do you have the drive model number handy ? I'd like to use that for some more Googling. Just using WDC Black may not be enough, to find a similar experience. It might be a particular afflicted model (because every firmware is different, and if you have 500GB/1TB/2TB drives, the last two use a different firmware than the first one - sometimes particular capacities of drives have a firmware bug). Paul |
#7
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WD Black
On 6/26/20 5:25 PM, Paul wrote:
philo wrote: On 6/26/20 5:05 PM, Paul wrote: philo wrote: snip I'm not aware of any other patterns that can be produced inside. There's no "wear leveling" in a hard drive. There are little test routines that drives use, but what the output of those would be, to the user, is a mystery. Like, if an internal short test fails, how does the drive tell you that, exactly ? Normally, the information would only be imparted, if an external utility commanded it, and the status that comes back tells you the result. One IBM drive used to self-test, every 71 seconds, and it was accompanied by a "screeching sound", since the test pattern caused seeks at high speed. That might have been on a 15K drive. It made the drive only suitable for locked server rooms, as no human could put up with such a noise inside a house or apartment. But again, to what purpose ? How does the drive tell you that something is wrong ? It can piggyback a sense code onto some unassuming SCSI command, but with SATA I don't know if the interface logically supports that sort of thing. Â*Â*Â* Paul Thanks Paul. For now I have the drives put away. Will run some tests on them next time I get a chance. Looking to the future though, I'll be moving everything to SSD. Seems like only yesterday I upgraded from an 850 meg drive to a 2 Gig. I was so nervous, I broke out into a cold sweat! Do you have the drive model number handy ? I'd like to use that for some more Googling. Just using WDC Black may not be enough, to find a similar experience. It might be a particular afflicted model (because every firmware is different, and if you have 500GB/1TB/2TB drives, the last two use a different firmware than the first one - sometimes particular capacities of drives have a firmware bug). Â*Â* Paul The drives are 2TB WD2003FZEX /64MB Cache Mfg date 2/ 2015 Malaysia 640 GB WD6401AALS /32MB Cache Oct 2010 Malaysia |
#8
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WD Black
philo wrote:
The drives are 2TB WD2003FZEX /64MB Cache Mfg date 2/ 2015 Malaysia 640 GB WD6401AALS /32MB Cache Oct 2010 Malaysia https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/co...g_noise_every/ "New HDD, WD Black WD2003FZEX Thumping Noise every 3-5 seconds" In another thread, a commenter says it even happens if the drive is powered, and has no data cable connected. An attempt to search on "WD2003FZEX firmware update" yields nothing sensible, implying no update is available. When a drive light flashes once a second on a PC, disconnect the optical drive data cable, and see if the flashing continues. Apparently that drive also makes the "motor noise" at shutdown. I have a WD2004FBYZ that makes a funny noise at shutdown, as if the motor spindle doesn't have a bearing at the top. Motor bearings can have two bearings (used until the motor is spinning fast enough), or one bearing. And at some point WDC seemed to switch motors to something that "drags a bit" when powering down. The deal with hard drive noises is, "the more noise a drive makes, the more likely it is to fail". My "pinball-machine" Seagate years ago (before the year 2000), it used to make quite a noise when the heads would "unlock" at startup. And one day, that thing did not release properly. And the competing forces inside the drive, ground the heads into the platter until the motor stalled. There was a loud "sproing" noise as well, like a clock mainspring, which was a sound likely coming from the arm with the heads on it. I didn't need to run a diagnostic that day :-/ You don't need a diagnostic when the sound effects are suitably loud. They could at least have had a car-crash sound come out of the computer speakers. Paul |
#9
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WD Black
My computer is shut down for the day so I am forced to use Google Groups now.
The 640 GB was the one my wife was using for Win10 and it had almost constant disk activity. If the machine sat idle for a half hour or so , it would settle down ... but just opening any app would bring activity back up to 100%. The SSD is a huge improvement. The 2TB was on my Ubuntu machine. It would have excess activity for about the first half hour, then eventually settle down. I also Googled and found some reports of trouble but many more good reviews.. My guess is you could Google for anything and find reports of trouble. Anyway...all seems to be fine now . |
#10
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WD Black
Philo565 wrote:
My computer is shut down for the day so I am forced to use Google Groups now. The 640 GB was the one my wife was using for Win10 and it had almost constant disk activity. If the machine sat idle for a half hour or so , it would settle down ... but just opening any app would bring activity back up to 100%. The SSD is a huge improvement. The 2TB was on my Ubuntu machine. It would have excess activity for about the first half hour, then eventually settle down. I also Googled and found some reports of trouble but many more good reviews. My guess is you could Google for anything and find reports of trouble. Anyway...all seems to be fine now . In the Task Manager, when running WIndows 10, you can see a couple things. SearchIndexer.exe can be grinding away at the disk, but usually the user does not have the Index set up to index everything via the Control Panel for it. That should not be the source of the activity. Windows Defender scans the System32 folder, and the Program Files folder at startup. On every boot. This is to detect malware in "critical areas". Windows Defender will settle down after a while. Task Manager can show some info. Task Manager, in the Performance panel, likely has a "resource monitor" button in the lower left somewhere. And that button, when you select the "disk" tab, can show the I/O that individual processes are doing. If the WDC disk makes the thumping sound every 3-5 seconds, that does *not* activate the activity light, if the drive is doing that itself. The disk lights tend to be related to commands sent to the drive. The SATA chip has a LEF driver pin. You can wire-OR multiple SATA controller chips, and share one LED over six hard drives if you want. A second, mostly unused mechanism, is the fifteen pin power cable, one of the pins has a secondary function. It can drive a LED (pull to ground), when the *disk* feels that a significant command has been run. This may be wired on servers, but I've never seen a desktop that uses this. Maybe, a five second "thump" could light that, but again, the company making the drive knows better than to expose internal activity using LED flashes. You don't do that. Summary: As far as I'm concerned, if a LED is blinking, a command is being sent to the drive. While we could pretend they violate an unwritten rule, odds are against the wiring being present to make it possible. The power cable comes straight from the PSU, which makes it difficult for any motherboard company to "suck" the status of the magical power pin. And the only way the Southbridge LED driver is going to flash, is when the Southbridge sends a SATA command. Paul |
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