Re: 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