Re: 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 <[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!

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