Re: 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 <[email protected]> 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/computing/309730-western-digital-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-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!