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  #1  
Old June 26th 20, 10:16 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 10:40 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
David W. Hodgins
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 147
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 10:46 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 11:05 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 11:09 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 11:25 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default 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  
Old June 26th 20, 11:48 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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  
Old June 27th 20, 12:22 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default 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  
Old June 27th 20, 01:43 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Philo565
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6
Default 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  
Old June 27th 20, 02:18 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default 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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