Hacking WD Greens (and Reds) with WDIDLE3.exe

[solarisguy]

It disappeared, since the heads had parked :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Hard_disk_drives suggests that you can hear sound of heads repetitively loading and then unloading, until they park.

If you waited for 300 seconds with no disk activity the sound would stop, too.

I have a rather limited hardware experience, but your disk is quite likely problematic.

 

[Ali777]

@solarisguy it is not fast as the audio in wiki
its like tab ... 4-6 sec ... tab ... 4-6 sec ... tab
maybe I'm being paranoid

 

[Bidule0hm]

Let me guess, it's every exactly 5 sec :)

If so it's just the system writing the logs, it's normal, you hear the drive(s) seeking.

 

[solarisguy]

Let me guess, it's every exactly 5 sec :)

If so it's just the system writing the logs, it's normal, you hear the drive(s) seeking.

@Ali777, you must have very quiet environment or the drive is next to your ear ?

 

[Ali777]

@Bidule0hm
you may be right, it's about every 5 sec
thank you man, now I can sleep at ease :p

 

[Ali777]

@solarisguy
actually both , and the drive is like 40 cm away from me

 

[Ali777]

@Bidule0hm

this is how it sounds , its every 3 sec

 

[Bidule0hm]

We can't hear a lot (sounds like if the mic was to far or too close or just very very poor quality) but if it's every 5 sec (or 5 sec multiples like 10 or 15 sec) then it's 99.99 % sure it's just the system writing logs ;)

 

[anodos]

We can't hear a lot (sounds like if the mic was to far or too close or just very very poor quality) but if it's every 5 sec (or 5 sec multiples like 10 or 15 sec) then it's 99.99 % sure it's just the system writing logs ;)

Or it's the NSA. Sweet dreams.

 

[joeschmuck]

So I listened to the audio file and it sounds like the drive is performing normal accessing. Here is what confuses me, you stated that if you set the timer to 8 seconds that after 8 seconds it is not making that noise. This does not jive with if the drive is accessing to read/write a log file or do any work for that matter of fact, stuff like that would reset the head parking timer and not allow the 8 second timer to time out and park the heads. Again, that is if it's doing work for the computer (FreeNAS).

So lets look at this one more time... With the timer set to 8 seconds or 300 seconds, does this very small noise ever stop under normal operation?

If the noise does in fact stop then I would suspect that the drive is doing something internal to itself that has nothing to do with FreeNAS, possibly just sweeping the head across the platter to ensure even wear (pure speculation on my part but there could be some new internal routine that we are unaware of). If you check the park counter, is it going up appreciably with the timer set to 300 seconds? (Tell us the count before and after and the period of time between those checks)

And if you have a concern about the drive, have you run a long SMART Test? You could also post the SMART output if in doubt.

 

[Ali777]

@joeschmuck
I installed the drive in my PC for storing data such as photos and movies
I noticed that the sound does stop after the head park and the counter goes up when it parks
the sound sometimes be continuously in 2.5 second interval , sometimes every 7 seconds and sometimes every 4 seconds
I saw that someone else had this problem
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2502706/green-makes-weird-noises.html

here are his videos, the sound is very similar to what my drive is doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfiCu5l495M&feature=youtu.be you can really hear it in 0:12 - 0:15

and this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEU4Al8vIP0 0:02 - 0:04 , 0:08 - 0:10 , 0:11 - 0:13

I also did a full sectors check by WD program WD data lifeguard diagnostic , it took almost 4 hours and it shows that the drive is fine

about the long SMART Test , How can I do it ?

 

[Bidule0hm]

smartctl -t long /dev/daX ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

@Ali777 Lets start all over for a second and get our facts straight because these things matter.

1) Where is this WD hard drive physically connected? It is to a PC running some OS like Windoze or a PC running FreeNAS software?
2) Yesterday @Bidule0hm gave you the command to run the long SMART test, post the results once the test completes.

So based on your last posting it appears you have the WD drive in a PC since you could run the WD diagnostics on it. It will be difficult to assist you if the parameters change. So with the counter only going up when the head parks, that is an expected thing and why I recommend using 300 seconds as so to minimize the head parking. Actually on my system I have disabled my head parking on my Red drives and they are going strong and although this is my personal preference, the 300 seconds is very reasonable.

As for the noise, it is very difficult for anyone here or on the internet as a whole to be able to tell you if the hard drive is abnormally loud because I can gauge the volume of that drive noise. All mechanical drives make a small amount of noise, they are not silent, however you will hear claims (even from me) of how my WD Red drives are virtually silent, and trust me, they are, however if I put my ear up to them, well I can head the drive spinning and the head actuator moving but this is still very quiet compared to many hard drives today. And it could be that your drive is a little noisy but if it's working and after the long SMART test we see that the results are fine (see my tagline for the link to SMART results) then maybe your drive is noisy to you.

Getting back to the noise stops after the heads park concern, well that is still odd to me so I would suggest you do something, with the head parking timer set to 300 seconds, and the drive only plugged into a power connector (no SATA data connector), does the drive noise still occur? The idea here is you would power up the drive and the heads would load, during the 5 minutes (300 seconds) the drive would make it's noise and then the heads park and all is quiet again. If you do this test and the noise is present, then there is something going on within the drive moving the head around. It could be some routine housekeeping or like on some drives the heads will sweep across the platters to even out the platter wearing (I've heard this in a WD Purple drive I have).

The ultimate answer here will come from those SMART test results and your judgement call on if you feel the noises are too loud. Too bad you don't have anything to compare it to, like a few other WD Green Drives.

EDIT: If we pursue this specific problem further, I would suggest opening a new thread because this has nothing to do with the head parking timer.

 

[solarisguy]

@Ali777, is it possible for you to buy a WD Red drive of the same size ?

 

[Sonik]

Has anyone had any experience using wdidle3 on the new WD Blue drives? My understanding is the 2 - 6tb drives are just re-labelled Greens anyway.

 

[ollopa]

Has anyone had any experience using wdidle3 on the new WD Blue drives? My understanding is the 2 - 6tb drives are just re-labelled Greens anyway.

Yes, and /S300 seems to work better for me than /D.

I used it on the 4TB Blue WDC WD40EZRZ-00WN9B0. Ran WDIDLE3 from UBCD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/)

The default setting was 8 seconds and my load cycles were high while my performance was bad. I first tried the /D option to disable the timer but performance was still poor. I get good performance with /S300 and the load cycle count has stopped increasing.

 

[Yatti420]

Relabled greens? That is disappointing.. Is the entire main WD line up not the same drives with different firmwares and labels?

 

[joeschmuck]

I first tried the /D option to disable the timer but performance was still poor.

Not sure what this has to do with performance issues as disabling would actually increase performance if anything.

 

[Ericloewe]

Relabled greens? That is disappointing.. Is the entire main WD line up not the same drives with different firmwares and labels?

They killed off the green name and rolled the drives (presumably with zero changes) into the Blue line. For extra consumer confusion, they kept the positively ancient 7200 RPM Blues around!

 

[Yatti420]

Oh wow thanks for the update.. I did notice blues pop up the other day for sale.. I like my seagates (and may be the only one around here.. So just run WDIDLE on every WD drive to be safe!