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NorthernFallout · 2011-02-25, 09:19

I am utterly stumped and clueless for what is going on with my primary HDD.

Hardware/Changes
550W
Asus P5K motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600@2.40GHz
4GB RAM (not sure what brand)
ATI 5770 1GB
C: Western Digital
D: Samsung F1 Spinpoint

My PC is now about 2.5 years old, and the only hardware changes I've done is a new graphics card and an extra HDD. Nothing is overclocked.

Now, the extra HDD I bought in 2009, prior to this problem existing. The GFX card I switched in the summer of 2010. At the same time, I upgraded to W7. The problem I'm about to explain appeared some time after that. I cannot remember exactly when, perhaps in August, give a month or so.

Problem description/Examples
The C: HDD is a Western Digital Caviar Green 750GB (WDC WD7500AACS-00ZJB0). From time to time, I can hear the HDD spinning down/powering down (don't know which), even though I might be active working on something. After a few seconds, I can hear it spins up again. Here is where the problems start.

Whenever it does this I can see the HDD LED lighting up for the duration (a constant light) of the "spin-up", and I can hear it "click" (but not as if the hardware is failing, just a natural "click") then the usual "thinking" noise before it stabilizes.

Now, during the time the LED is lit, stuff have a tendency to freeze. Music plays and my mouse is moveable, but I cannot interact with certain applications. The weird thing is that it isn't constant and varies. For example:

I play WoW, just grinding away. I hear the HDD spin down, then up, the LED is lit, but the game doesn't freeze. Another time, the game does freeze. Sometimes the HDD keeps quiet and works normally. EVE does the same thing.

Then take NFS: Hot Pursuit. This game has never frozen... But the loading times increases whenever the HDD does this thing. It has never frozen during a race either.

Another gaming example is Company of Heroes. This is a weird one. This game doesn't freeze either... But certain sounds disappears. In a battle, the gunshots and music might disappear, but you can still hear the ambient noise and voice of the characters (and control everything). They all come back when the HDD settles. It does freeze from time to time, though.

These games are played without a DVD (installed on C). Bad Company 2, which I do play with a DVD, rarely freezes. It HAS frozen from time to time, but it's very rare. I can still hear the HDD thing, however.

For other applications, Word freezes a lot. So does Firefox, Opera or anything else. It has frozen two times when I'm writing this. Similarly, browsing folders can freeze it. Watching a movie *might* freeze, but it's rare. Basically, anything that requires C: to "go active" makes it happen. Sometimes. All of the mentioned applications are installed on C:, as is W7, though it's somewhat obvious.

The freezing is constant in terms of duration. I haven't timed it but it's somewhere around 5-7 seconds. As for often it does it, though, varies. However, it's almost certain it does it after I haven't touched anything for a few minutes.

Solutions tried
Defrag. No change.
Anti-virus/ad-aware scan (it's been done several times during the year and has yielded nothing.)
Disconnecting D:. No change (and hence I know it's C)
Ran Western Digital's own diagnostics software with Ultimate Boot CD. Quick test and Extended Test yielded 0 errors.
Checked power saving. No options chosen. HDD set to sleep never. Even setting it to something doesn't work as it won't go to sleep at those times either.

Solutions not tried
Update drivers (very sketchy as of where I can get a hold of them. WD's site doesn't help)
Memtest
Another PSU (This I rather not do. Expensive, unsure if it's even the problem, complicated)
Testing C: in another PC (Unable to do so at the time due to my location)

Ultimate solution
Buying a new HDD, reinstalling W7 on it and put my current WD in an external case, using it for storage, as it seemingly still works.

So there you have it. I'm out of ideas now. While it still *works* it's something that is annoying to an extreme. Everything of importance I have back-ups of.

SaintessHeart · 2011-02-25, 10:24

CCleaner. And I suspect that it may be a corrupted OS or boot sector problem. Have you tried rolling back using system restore?

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-25, 11:03

^I don't use system restore in general, and I'd rather not, but I'll see what I can do. CCleaner I've run sometimes, forgot to add that... Weirdly enough I can't find it now. Will do another try.

SaintessHeart · 2011-02-26, 01:39

The 2 suggestions are the final solutions on your software side. Also, remember to turn off file paging before you run them.

Jinto · 2011-02-26, 04:03

Check if you have energy saving options enabled. If so turn them off for HDD, a hard drive that is constantly powering down and up is not going to live very long (I don't know why this is even considered a good practice, so that it is still supported by MS OSes for mechanical hard drives (SSD might be a different matter)).

The freezing is because most programs need to read data for processing. However, data storages like HDDs you cannot access in parallel. So if one file IO access to the HDD takes a very long time, and other processes are in the need of reading data too the system will partially stall (there are also transitive dependencies... example: Processes A,C,D,E need system process B which needs to read from the HDD but is currently not able to and hence stalls. This will also stall the processes A,C,D and E since they are dependent on B).

Hence a very long read/write operation might freeze other stuff while it is happening. Data caches might work without interruption (if they have no transitive dependencies), like a precached music file (the whole file is already read into RAM/sound processor and therefore the data is available and the song can be played back in its entirety without a second read operation).

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-26, 04:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

The 2 suggestions are the final solutions on your software side. Also, remember to turn off file paging before you run them.

Understood. Will do that now.

EDIT: No restore points available (created one now, just in case). Ran CCleaner with file paging off, no difference.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jinto

Check if you have energy safing options enabled. If so turn them off for HDD, a hard drive that is constantly powering down and up is not going to live very long (I don't know why this is even considered a good practice, so that it is still supported by MS OSes for mechanical hard drives (SSD might be a different matter)).

By energy saving options, do you mean those in "Change advanced power settings" and then "Turn off hard disk after"? Because that is set to Never. Unless you mean another specific option.

The weird thing about that is that it worked for a while. The problem went away after I changed it to Never back in December... After a few days it started again. So yeah.

EDIT: Thanks for extended post, make the mystery a bit more understandable.

Jinto · 2011-02-26, 04:26

Does your BIOS contain energy saving options? I mean I cannot give you a straight answer to your problem. The best I can do is giving you a general hint. Because a detailed problem analysis, would require detailed knowledge of your system. And unfortunately I lack this detailed knowledge of your system.

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-26, 04:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jinto

Does your BIOS contain energy saving options?

Ah... The BIOS is one place I have not checked at all. Will do that now.

Jinto · 2011-02-26, 04:43

If you can rule out energy saving procedures as a culprit, you might want to check the S.M.A.R.T history of the drive (maybe the drive is troubled with something... and then it is a good idea to replace the drive, because chances are it will only get worse from there). Anyway, I think this wikipedia article is good start if you never heard of S.M.A.R.T before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-26, 04:46

^Checked BIOS, no weird settings there as far as I can see. Under Power:

Suspend Mode [Auto]
Repost video on S3 Resume [Disabled]
ACPI Version [Disabled]
ACPI APIC Support [Enabled]

HDD themselves had no such options.

Will take a further look into S.M.A.R.T. then.

EDIT: I had forgotten Speedfan had it. Nothing weird there either, as far as I can determine.

Spoiler for pic:

Jinto · 2011-02-26, 05:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by AtomicoX

^Checked BIOS, no weird settings there as far as I can see. Under Power:

Suspend Mode [Auto]
Repost video on S3 Resume [Disabled]
ACPI Version [Disabled]
ACPI APIC Support [Enabled]

HDD themselves had no such options.

Will take a further look into S.M.A.R.T. then.

EDIT: I had forgotten Speedfan had it. Nothing weird there either, as far as I can determine.

Spoiler for pic:

Can you check the raw counters again, when you had such a freeze? At the moment the counters look very normal. Well, it could be some sort of mallicious software which causes this behaviour. But that is just a vague guess.

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-26, 05:37

^ Will do, if I'll be able to catch it.

Tbh, malware seems more and more likely. But in that case it seems to be sitting deep.

cyberbeing · 2011-02-26, 15:13

What you are experiencing is just the nature of WD Green drives. They auto-park their heads and go to sleep every 8 seconds...

Create a DOS startup disk and run WDIDLE3 /s 300. That will set the auto-park time to 300 seconds. You can also disable it completely with WDIDLE3 /d if the former doesn't fix it.

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-26, 15:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

What you are experiencing is just the nature of WD Green drives. They auto-park their heads and go to sleep every 8 seconds...

Create a DOS startup disk and run WDIDLE3 /s 300. That will set the auto-park time to 300 seconds. You can also disable it completely with WDIDLE3 /d if the former doesn't fix it.

I did find something about WDIDLE3 but didn't investigate. So that's what it is. Thanks for the tip.

Jinto · 2011-02-26, 15:59

In this case green can be translated as annoying ^^' this sounds like a crazy energy saving strategy to me.

Tiberium Wolf · 2011-02-26, 17:23

What is this auto-park feature of WD drives? I am curious about it. I googled and it seems like a energy saving measure that not sure what does it do with the head but maintains the the disks spinning. Not sure how does this saves energy.

cyberbeing · 2011-02-26, 18:21

Western Digital IntelliPark - By unloading the recording heads while the drive is idle, drag is reduced on the disk, requiring less energy to maintain it's minimum rotation speed. It also disables some of the internal electronics during these rest periods to save additional energy.

Low power states aren't unique to Western Digital, but WD's overly aggressive use of IntelliPark has a reputation of causing problems, depending on how the drive is used.

liquidmetal · 2011-02-26, 21:56

Yup if its a WD Green than after 8 seconds of inactivity the disk automatically parks its heads so it takes a while to become responsive again.

It is widely debated for maybe shortening the lifespan of a drive as it increase the amount of times the head touches the fast moving platter (load/unload count).

Tl;dr Alot of people use Wdidle3 to set the inactivity timer to either 300s (max) or disable it altogether (1hr iirc) as cyberbeing has already said.

EDIT. Imo I would switch around your drives so that the Samsung F1 is your primary as it is the faster drive and shouldn't display this freezing issues. WD Greens are more used as a storage drive for movies, music, etc, rather than an os drive.

NorthernFallout · 2011-02-27, 03:12

Quite a stupid thing, really. I'm done with WD, that's for sure. Either way, I'm going to try WDIDLE3 first and if that makes no change, I'm gonna see to swapping the OS around. Thanks for all the help and explanations, guys.

Tiberium Wolf · 2011-02-27, 09:22

Wait a min! If he was using the WD as the OS and installed programs drive, how in the hell did the drive auto-parked? Shouldn't there always be a lot of activity?

2011-02-25, 09:19	Link #1
NorthernFallout The Interstellar Medium Author Join Date: May 2008 Location: [SWE] Age: 34	Mysterious freezing problem with a WD HDD I am utterly stumped and clueless for what is going on with my primary HDD. Hardware/Changes 550W Asus P5K motherboard Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600@2.40GHz 4GB RAM (not sure what brand) ATI 5770 1GB C: Western Digital D: Samsung F1 Spinpoint My PC is now about 2.5 years old, and the only hardware changes I've done is a new graphics card and an extra HDD. Nothing is overclocked. Now, the extra HDD I bought in 2009, prior to this problem existing. The GFX card I switched in the summer of 2010. At the same time, I upgraded to W7. The problem I'm about to explain appeared some time after that. I cannot remember exactly when, perhaps in August, give a month or so. Problem description/Examples The C: HDD is a Western Digital Caviar Green 750GB (WDC WD7500AACS-00ZJB0). From time to time, I can hear the HDD spinning down/powering down (don't know which), even though I might be active working on something. After a few seconds, I can hear it spins up again. Here is where the problems start. Whenever it does this I can see the HDD LED lighting up for the duration (a constant light) of the "spin-up", and I can hear it "click" (but not as if the hardware is failing, just a natural "click") then the usual "thinking" noise before it stabilizes. Now, during the time the LED is lit, stuff have a tendency to freeze. Music plays and my mouse is moveable, but I cannot interact with certain applications. The weird thing is that it isn't constant and varies. For example: I play WoW, just grinding away. I hear the HDD spin down, then up, the LED is lit, but the game doesn't freeze. Another time, the game does freeze. Sometimes the HDD keeps quiet and works normally. EVE does the same thing. Then take NFS: Hot Pursuit. This game has never frozen... But the loading times increases whenever the HDD does this thing. It has never frozen during a race either. Another gaming example is Company of Heroes. This is a weird one. This game doesn't freeze either... But certain sounds disappears. In a battle, the gunshots and music might disappear, but you can still hear the ambient noise and voice of the characters (and control everything). They all come back when the HDD settles. It does freeze from time to time, though. These games are played without a DVD (installed on C). Bad Company 2, which I do play with a DVD, rarely freezes. It HAS frozen from time to time, but it's very rare. I can still hear the HDD thing, however. For other applications, Word freezes a lot. So does Firefox, Opera or anything else. It has frozen two times when I'm writing this. Similarly, browsing folders can freeze it. Watching a movie might freeze, but it's rare. Basically, anything that requires C: to "go active" makes it happen. Sometimes. All of the mentioned applications are installed on C:, as is W7, though it's somewhat obvious. The freezing is constant in terms of duration. I haven't timed it but it's somewhere around 5-7 seconds. As for often it does it, though, varies. However, it's almost certain it does it after I haven't touched anything for a few minutes. Solutions tried Defrag. No change. Anti-virus/ad-aware scan (it's been done several times during the year and has yielded nothing.) Disconnecting D:. No change (and hence I know it's C) Ran Western Digital's own diagnostics software with Ultimate Boot CD. Quick test and Extended Test yielded 0 errors. Checked power saving. No options chosen. HDD set to sleep never. Even setting it to something doesn't work as it won't go to sleep at those times either. Solutions not tried Update drivers (very sketchy as of where I can get a hold of them. WD's site doesn't help) Memtest Another PSU (This I rather not do. Expensive, unsure if it's even the problem, complicated) Testing C: in another PC (Unable to do so at the time due to my location) Ultimate solution Buying a new HDD, reinstalling W7 on it and put my current WD in an external case, using it for storage, as it seemingly still works. So there you have it. I'm out of ideas now. While it still works it's something that is annoying to an extreme. Everything of importance I have back-ups of. __________________

2011-02-25, 10:24	Link #2
SaintessHeart NYAAAAHAAANNNNN~ Join Date: Nov 2007 Age: 35	CCleaner. And I suspect that it may be a corrupted OS or boot sector problem. Have you tried rolling back using system restore? __________________ When three puppygirls named after pastries are on top of each other, it is called Eclair a'la menthe et Biscotti aux fraises avec beaucoup de Ricotta sur le dessus. Most of all, you have to be disciplined and you have to save, even if you hate our current financial system. Because if you don't save, then you're guaranteed to end up with nothing.

2011-02-25, 11:03	Link #3
NorthernFallout The Interstellar Medium Author Join Date: May 2008 Location: [SWE] Age: 34	^I don't use system restore in general, and I'd rather not, but I'll see what I can do. CCleaner I've run sometimes, forgot to add that... Weirdly enough I can't find it now. Will do another try. __________________

2011-02-26, 01:39	Link #4
SaintessHeart NYAAAAHAAANNNNN~ Join Date: Nov 2007 Age: 35	The 2 suggestions are the final solutions on your software side. Also, remember to turn off file paging before you run them. __________________ When three puppygirls named after pastries are on top of each other, it is called Eclair a'la menthe et Biscotti aux fraises avec beaucoup de Ricotta sur le dessus. Most of all, you have to be disciplined and you have to save, even if you hate our current financial system. Because if you don't save, then you're guaranteed to end up with nothing.

2011-02-26, 04:03	Link #5
Jinto Asuki-tan Kairin ↓ Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Fürth (GER) Age: 43	Check if you have energy saving options enabled. If so turn them off for HDD, a hard drive that is constantly powering down and up is not going to live very long (I don't know why this is even considered a good practice, so that it is still supported by MS OSes for mechanical hard drives (SSD might be a different matter)). The freezing is because most programs need to read data for processing. However, data storages like HDDs you cannot access in parallel. So if one file IO access to the HDD takes a very long time, and other processes are in the need of reading data too the system will partially stall (there are also transitive dependencies... example: Processes A,C,D,E need system process B which needs to read from the HDD but is currently not able to and hence stalls. This will also stall the processes A,C,D and E since they are dependent on B). Hence a very long read/write operation might freeze other stuff while it is happening. Data caches might work without interruption (if they have no transitive dependencies), like a precached music file (the whole file is already read into RAM/sound processor and therefore the data is available and the song can be played back in its entirety without a second read operation). __________________ Folding@Home, Team Animesuki Last edited by Jinto; 2011-02-26 at 04:20.

2011-02-26, 04:26	Link #7
Jinto Asuki-tan Kairin ↓ Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Fürth (GER) Age: 43	Does your BIOS contain energy saving options? I mean I cannot give you a straight answer to your problem. The best I can do is giving you a general hint. Because a detailed problem analysis, would require detailed knowledge of your system. And unfortunately I lack this detailed knowledge of your system. __________________ Folding@Home, Team Animesuki

2011-02-26, 04:43	Link #9
Jinto Asuki-tan Kairin ↓ Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Fürth (GER) Age: 43	If you can rule out energy saving procedures as a culprit, you might want to check the S.M.A.R.T history of the drive (maybe the drive is troubled with something... and then it is a good idea to replace the drive, because chances are it will only get worse from there). Anyway, I think this wikipedia article is good start if you never heard of S.M.A.R.T before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. __________________ Folding@Home, Team Animesuki

2011-02-26, 04:46	Link #10
NorthernFallout The Interstellar Medium Author Join Date: May 2008 Location: [SWE] Age: 34	^Checked BIOS, no weird settings there as far as I can see. Under Power: Suspend Mode [Auto] Repost video on S3 Resume [Disabled] ACPI Version [Disabled] ACPI APIC Support [Enabled] HDD themselves had no such options. Will take a further look into S.M.A.R.T. then. EDIT: I had forgotten Speedfan had it. Nothing weird there either, as far as I can determine. Spoiler for pic: Raw Read Error Rate was 200/200/51/0000000000 "The overall fitness for this drive is 99%. The overall performance for this drive is 100%." __________________

2011-02-26, 05:37	Link #12
NorthernFallout The Interstellar Medium Author Join Date: May 2008 Location: [SWE] Age: 34	^ Will do, if I'll be able to catch it. Tbh, malware seems more and more likely. But in that case it seems to be sitting deep. __________________

2011-02-26, 15:13	Link #13
cyberbeing Senior Member Join Date: May 2006 Location: California	What you are experiencing is just the nature of WD Green drives. They auto-park their heads and go to sleep every 8 seconds... Create a DOS startup disk and run WDIDLE3 /s 300. That will set the auto-park time to 300 seconds. You can also disable it completely with WDIDLE3 /d if the former doesn't fix it. __________________

2011-02-26, 15:59	Link #15
Jinto Asuki-tan Kairin ↓ Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Fürth (GER) Age: 43	In this case green can be translated as annoying ^^' this sounds like a crazy energy saving strategy to me. __________________ Folding@Home, Team Animesuki

2011-02-26, 17:23	Link #16
Tiberium Wolf Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Portugal Age: 44	What is this auto-park feature of WD drives? I am curious about it. I googled and it seems like a energy saving measure that not sure what does it do with the head but maintains the the disks spinning. Not sure how does this saves energy. __________________

2011-02-26, 18:21	Link #17
cyberbeing Senior Member Join Date: May 2006 Location: California	Western Digital IntelliPark - By unloading the recording heads while the drive is idle, drag is reduced on the disk, requiring less energy to maintain it's minimum rotation speed. It also disables some of the internal electronics during these rest periods to save additional energy. Low power states aren't unique to Western Digital, but WD's overly aggressive use of IntelliPark has a reputation of causing problems, depending on how the drive is used. __________________

2011-02-26, 21:56	Link #18
liquidmetal procrastinating... Join Date: Aug 2010	Yup if its a WD Green than after 8 seconds of inactivity the disk automatically parks its heads so it takes a while to become responsive again. It is widely debated for maybe shortening the lifespan of a drive as it increase the amount of times the head touches the fast moving platter (load/unload count). Tl;dr Alot of people use Wdidle3 to set the inactivity timer to either 300s (max) or disable it altogether (1hr iirc) as cyberbeing has already said. EDIT. Imo I would switch around your drives so that the Samsung F1 is your primary as it is the faster drive and shouldn't display this freezing issues. WD Greens are more used as a storage drive for movies, music, etc, rather than an os drive. Last edited by liquidmetal; 2011-02-26 at 22:07.

2011-02-27, 03:12	Link #19
NorthernFallout The Interstellar Medium Author Join Date: May 2008 Location: [SWE] Age: 34	Quite a stupid thing, really. I'm done with WD, that's for sure. Either way, I'm going to try WDIDLE3 first and if that makes no change, I'm gonna see to swapping the OS around. Thanks for all the help and explanations, guys. __________________

2011-02-27, 09:22	Link #20
Tiberium Wolf Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Portugal Age: 44	Wait a min! If he was using the WD as the OS and installed programs drive, how in the hell did the drive auto-parked? Shouldn't there always be a lot of activity? __________________