# Critical Design Flaw Found in WD Caviar Green HDDs



## Regeneration (Apr 20, 2011)

> It has come to our attention that Western Digital's Caviar Green HDDs suffer from a critical design flaw caused by an aggressive power-saving feature. Western Digital has developed a new technology called Intellipark (aka Idle 3 mode) and it is designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the HDD's heads in a park position and turning off unnecessary electronics after 8 seconds of inactivity.
> 
> According to an in-house investigation and user reports', some software and operating systems are incompatible with the Intellipark feature causing endless head parking movement as the HDD continuously goes in/out of idle mode. This abnormal behavior creates stress on the HDD and that could lead to the following issues:
> 
> ...



Read more: http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critical-design-flaw-found-in-wd-caviar-green-hdds.html


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## erixx (Apr 20, 2011)

i have 2 of those and i am very happy. no problems of parking under win7. but thanks


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## Widjaja (Apr 20, 2011)

Western Digital have offered a way to disable the intellipark feature a while back.


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## 95Viper (Apr 20, 2011)

Regeneration said:


> It has come to our attention that Western Digital's Caviar Green HDDs suffer from a critical design flaw



It took a while to come to your attention...
The referenced post over at SPCR, here:Is there a problem with head parks on WD Green HDDs? was posted back on Sat Dec 13, *2008* 8:59 am.

I have one and never had the problems suggested.  And, I have used it in a Linux machine, also, before.

Maybe, just got lucky or something; or, could be the way the owner/operator has set up their OS or apps.

But, thanks for the heads-up.


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## inferKNOX (Apr 20, 2011)

What a time to leave us, Samsung!
j/k


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## yogurt_21 (Apr 20, 2011)

have 5 of them running at home. 2 in a nas in raid 1 and 3 in raid 0 in my main rig. No issues whatsoever. then again the specific model isn't mentioned. Mine are all EARS.


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## W1zzard (Apr 20, 2011)

on a new 1.5 TB drive i have 737 hours on and 13864 load cycles.

737 * 3600 / 13864 = 1 park event every 191 seconds

at 300k estimated parks each 191 seconds = 15947 hours of lifetime = 664 days

clearly not "critical" .. wd's rma is very easy and fast anyway


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## hat (Apr 20, 2011)

I'm pretty sure mine is never idle anyway, as I have a pagefile on it (and my system drive as well)...

Still, we should be aware of this.


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## Sihastru (Apr 20, 2011)

Four of my many 2TB green drives stats:

1. WD20EARS
Power On Hours Count: 1274
Load Cycle Count: 9690

2. WD20EARS
Power On Hours Count: 1646
Load Cycle Count: 11836

3. WD20EARS
Power On Hours Count: 388
Load Cycle Count: 5148

4. WD20EARS
Power On Hours Count: 388
Load Cycle Count: 5095

I am not worried at all. There is no actual proof that links general drive failures to the head parking feature. It's just paranoia.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 20, 2011)

I swear this problem has been around for ages, it caused RAID controllers to freak out when the WD Green drives were first introduced, though a firmware fix helped the issue, I've been complaining about it for a while now.  It is the reason I don't buy WD Green drives.  If I want a low power drive I'll buy a Seagate LP.

Edit: To give you an idea of just how long this problem has been known, here is a post from Jan 2010: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1367904

Edit2:  Here is one from April 2009: http://www.networkedmediatank.com/printthread.php?tid=20686


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## Sihastru (Apr 20, 2011)

I think some RAID controllers used to freak out because of the absence or presence of TLER and not because of the head parking feature.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 20, 2011)

Sihastru said:


> I think some RAID controllers used to freak out because of the absence or presence of TLER and not because of the head parking feature.



The absences of TLER was a problem with the Black drives in RAID, but the head parking issue was been a problem with Green drives since long before the TLER issues.


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## Regeneration (Apr 21, 2011)

Yes, this issue was discovered in 2008, but nobody bothered to post an article about it – so a lot of people are clueless. And by the way, this issue still appears even on the latest models. 

I consider it critical as not all PC users monitor SMART. Those Green series are quite popular... you know, cheap hardware sells. Look at the SPCR's thread, some of the load cycles data is really troubling. 

I've experienced this issue with a brand new WD10EARS drive from Feb/2011 on Windows 7 (fresh installation with single 3rd party software – FileZilla).

Again - take in mind - not all PC users are experienced like us


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## yogurt_21 (Apr 21, 2011)

Regeneration said:


> Yes, this issue was discovered in 2008, but nobody bothered to post an article about it – so a lot of people are clueless. And by the way, this issue still appears even on the latest models.
> 
> I consider it critical as not all PC users monitor SMART. Those Green series are quite popular... you know, cheap hardware sells. Look at the SPCR's thread, some of the load cycles data is really troubling.
> 
> ...



oh? how are you "experienced" in a way that I'm not? Can you beat 10 years of server management?

again i've seen no issues with any of my wd greens. This is a paranoia non issue.



newtekie1 said:


> I swear this problem has been around for ages, it caused RAID controllers to freak out when the WD Green drives were first introduced, though a firmware fix helped the issue, I've been complaining about it for a while now.  It is the reason I don't buy WD Green drives.  If I want a low power drive I'll buy a Seagate LP.
> 
> Edit: To give you an idea of just how long this problem has been known, here is a post from Jan 2010: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1367904
> 
> Edit2:  Here is one from April 2009: http://www.networkedmediatank.com/printthread.php?tid=20686



did you bother reading any of the comments on either article? both articles we're basically pointed out as incorrect in the comments below them. In all it seems most have been running for years without issue. Drives fail sure, but you can't just take a single wdgreen failure and enter a conspiracy theory. Wdgreens run fine, my raid 1 config has been up and running for 1 year without issue on my nas, no slowing no random park errors in smart, no issues whatsoever. We have several WDgreens running in servers at work that have been up for over 2 years consecutively, no issues on those drives either. At worst the feature can slow the drive down. Considering it's a damned green drive that's exactly what it supposed to do. lol If you want performance you should be going for the black editions anyways.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 21, 2011)

yogurt_21 said:


> oh? how are you "experienced" in a way that I'm not? Can you beat 10 years of server management?
> 
> again i've seen no issues with any of my wd greens. This is a paranoia non issue.
> 
> did you bother reading any of the comments on either article? both articles we're basically pointed out as incorrect in the comments below them. In all it seems most have been running for years without issue. Drives fail sure, but you can't just take a single wdgreen failure and enter a conspiracy theory. Wdgreens run fine, my raid 1 config has been up and running for 1 year without issue on my nas, no slowing no random park errors in smart, no issues whatsoever. We have several WDgreens running in servers at work that have been up for over 2 years consecutively, no issues on those drives either. At worst the feature can slow the drive down. Considering it's a damned green drive that's exactly what it supposed to do. lol If you want performance you should be going for the black editions anyways



Read his post again, he said not all PC users are experienced "like us".  You would be part of the "us" that is experienced.

This problem will show it self in different usage senarios.  Just because you haven't seen the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exists.  I'm sure I could find someone out there that still has a functioning Antec Smartpower PSU, that doesn't mean they weren't poorly designed pieces of garbage with insanely high failure rates.

The fact is these drives are designed for storage drives.  When used as a storage drive, that isn't constantly accessed, there isn't a problem.  However, when used as an OS drive, or a drive that is accessed a lot, it becomes a problem.  I know I've seen a oddly large number of WD Green drives come into my shop failed that were used as OS drives, and I would venture to bet this is why.  People buy them, or heck even OEMs buy them, thinking they are cheap and huge, so it is a good deal.  They pop them in their machines to replace the older smaller OS drive, and think nothing of it.

And I've personally seen them freak out RAID controllers.   I bought several of the first generation green drives for a RAID5 array on a highpoint controller.  About once a week, the controller would mark one of the disks as failed.  Reboot the machine and the RAID controller would see the drive again and rebuild the array and all was well again.  Used the utility provided by WD to change the park time to 30 seconds and never had a disk falsely marked as bad again.

Is it a huge problem?  No, not as big as many make it out to be.  Will it shorten the life of the drive?  You bet, but probably not to the point that is really matters for most users.  Is it something people should be made aware of?  Yes.  Is it something WD should fix?  Hell yes.

The part that probably gets most "angry" is the fact that it is just an easy fix, and WD has just not done it.  Simply changing the firmware to park the heads after 30 seconds instead of 8 would reduce the problem to near non-existance in any usage senario.


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## silkstone (Apr 21, 2011)

I have a new WD EARS

Power On Hours Count: 286
Load Cycle Count: 40
Whatever that means

Only Error is a UDMA CRC Error - but that is prolly due to the cable being squashed at the back of my case. i just did some cable management and the cable was twisted an akward way, when i fit it all back together, causing Bios not to see the drive. I don;t think you can ever clear that error but I should really get a new cable, but Meh.

Oh, maybe this would be useful to you: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/french_retailer_data_offers_ssd_failure_rates/
A failure rate reported by a french retailer, not sure of the sample size tho.


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## W1zzard (Apr 21, 2011)

silkstone said:


> Power On Hours Count: 286
> Load Cycle Count: 40
> Whatever that means



that means that in 286 hours your drive used up 40 of the estimated 300,000 cycles it can do.

some basic math will give you an estimate how many hours you can expect to get out of the drive.


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## erixx (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> senerios



fak yeah! haha scenarios lol Forcing the boundaries of our imagination&understanding, we, the non native English speaking majority!


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## silkstone (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> I know I've seen a oddly large number of WD Green drives come into my shop failed that were used as OS drives,



This is kind of common sense really tho. The more a drive is used, the more likely it is to fail. Hence an OS drive is more likely to fail than a backup drive, right? I'm sure of all the failed drives that companies recieve for RMA, the majority are OS drives, or drives that are used a lot. Furthermore, i'm ure the majority of systems would have only the 1 drive, hence that drive being an Os drive. Ergo, an os drive is the most likely kind of drive to be returned for replacement.

I'm sorry, but to back up claims we really need un-bias facts, not rumors from the inter-webs.




W1zzard said:


> that means that in 286 hours your drive used up 40 of the estimated 300,000 cycles it can do.
> 
> some basic math will give you an estimate how many hours you can expect to get out of the drive.



Thanks. That makes sense, i should have known that, but i didn't realize a drives lifetime was based on the Load Cycle Count. What exactly is load cycle count in laymans terms? i'm assuming it means the amount of times the disk has been spun up to full operating speed and the heads moved in to position?


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## yogurt_21 (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> Read his post again, he said not all PC users are experienced "like us".  You would be part of the "us" that is experienced.
> 
> This problem will show it self in different usage senerios.  Just because you haven't seen the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exists.  I'm sure I could find someone out there that still has a functioning Antec Smartpower PSU, that doesn't mean they weren't poorly designed pieces of garbage with insanely high failure rates.
> 
> ...



that's a raid controller issue, not a drive issue. If the drive works and the raid controller is posting errors you need to take a look at the raid controller. 

besides anyone who think's it's great to use large drives as os drives has their own problems. All storage servers I've ever built have a seperate os drive or a seperate os raid. Not to mention power saving on a boot drive is going to result in painfully long load times.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 21, 2011)

silkstone said:


> This is kind of common sense really tho. The more a drive is used, the more likely it is to fail. Hence an OS drive is more likely to fail than a backup drive, right? I'm sure of all the failed drives that companies recieve for RMA, the majority are OS drives, or drives that are used a lot. Furthermore, i'm ure the majority of systems would have only the 1 drive, hence that drive being an Os drive. Ergo, an os drive is the most likely kind of drive to be returned for replacement.



Yes, but the point was that I don't see them coming in when used as storage drives.  The usage matters.  I see more WD Green drives failed as OS drives than any other type of drive when used as an OS drive.



silkstone said:


> I'm sorry, but to back up claims we really need un-bias facts, not rumors from the inter-webs.



Ok, you want some facts, try reading some.  WD released a tool to help the issue, how much more of a fact do you need?



yogurt_21 said:


> that's a raid controller issue, not a drive issue. If the drive works and the raid controller is posting errors you need to take a look at the raid controller.



Not when every other drive used with the controllers worked fine.  The delay to unpark the heads when the drive went idle caused the controller to think the drive was dead and mark it as bad.  Same issue with the TLER, but for a different reason.



yogurt_21 said:


> besides anyone who think's it's great to use large drives as os drives has their own problems. All storage servers I've ever built have a seperate os drive or a seperate os raid. Not to mention power saving on a boot drive is going to result in painfully long load times.



Large drives as OS drives are a must.  Why you ask?  Because density increases performance, so a large drive, with denser platters, is faster than a small drive with less dense platters.  So even if you are only going to use 250MB, it is better to have a 1TB drive than a 250GB drive, because the 1TB will be faster(assuming all the rest of the specs are the same).

As for your claim that power saving will result in "painfully long load times", it really makes me question if you have ever really used any of these drives, because the really aren't all that noticeably slower than something like caviar blue.


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## cheesy999 (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> Large drives as OS drives are a must. Why you ask? Because density increases performance, so a large drive, with denser platters, is faster than a small drive with less dense platters. So even if you are only going to use 250MB, it is better to have a 1TB drive than a 250GB drive, because the 1TB will be faster(assuming all the rest of the specs are the same).
> 
> As for your claim that power saving will result in "painfully long load times", it really makes me question if you have ever really used any of these drives, because the really aren't all that noticeably slower than something like caviar blue.



the drive doesn't have too be larger though, the 500gb f3 is actually slightly faster then the 1tb f3, just needs high gb/platter


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## newtekie1 (Apr 21, 2011)

cheesy999 said:


> the drive doesn't have too be larger though, the 500gb f3 is actually slightly faster then the 1tb f3, just needs high gb/platter



You're right, but that is the exeption, not the rule.  Generally, all things being equal, the larger drive will be faster.


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## cheesy999 (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> You're right, but that is the exeption, not the rule. Generally, all things being equal, the larger drive will be faster.



i'd reply with something about the 5000 rpm 2-3tb drives you get but i feel like that would be trolling - especially as this is what a lot of wd greens are and were off-topic slightly anyway

none of this changes the fact that instead of just disabling this feature they should off fixed it, through a firmware update or through a hardware recall

and power saving dosn't kick in on a boot drive normally as most of the time on most people pc's leaving it in idle causes the av to kick in or some other background program carries on running, i've never had my drive fall to sleep as an os drive but then again its a hitachi deathstar so it is probably compleatly different in design eg:no intelli park


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## 95Viper (Apr 21, 2011)

It is not FUD or un-founded rumor or any other BS.
And, I am not pointing fingers, but some need to check facts for themselves before they make posts that dispute the facts.:shadedshu

Just because it has not happened does not mean it could not.  Read the WD FAQs!

Did any of you nay sayers take the time to look at the link to the WD Knowlrdge Base FAQ(The S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter keeps increasing on a SATA 2 hard drive) 
that links to here, too, The S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter continue to increase for the WD RE2-GP SATA II hard drives?

I don't believe they would put out these FAQs for sh*ts and grins... must be truth in there somewhere.


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## newtekie1 (Apr 21, 2011)

cheesy999 said:


> none of this changes the fact that instead of just disabling this feature they should off fixed it, through a firmware update or through a hardware recall
> 
> and power saving dosn't kick in on a boot drive normally as most of the time on most people pc's leaving it in idle causes the av to kick in or some other background program carries on running, i've never had my drive fall to sleep as an os drive but then again its a hitachi deathstar so it is probably compleatly different in design eg:no intelli park



Yes, they should have fixed it with a firmware fix.  As I said, it should be set to 30 seconds, and it would be much less of a problem.

As for the OS drive being idle, yes the normal power saving feature that puts drives to sleep is rarely activated on an OS drive unless the computer goes unused for a while.  However, that feature also defaults to an idle time of 20 minutes, which is probably why you've never seen it happen.  The head parking is different then a normal drive going sleep, it uses it's own internal timer that parks the heads after just 8 seconds of idle time.  The problem is actually caused by the drives being OS drives, because 8 seconds of idle times happens a lot on an OS drive, but the drive is also used a lot more so it has to park and unpark the heads way to often.


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## yogurt_21 (Apr 21, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> Yes, they should have fixed it with a firmware fix.  As I said, it should be set to 30 seconds, and it would be much less of a problem.
> 
> As for the OS drive being idle, yes the normal power saving feature that puts drives to sleep is rarely activated on an OS drive unless the computer goes unused for a while.  However, that feature also defaults to an idle time of 20 minutes, which is probably why you've never seen it happen.  The head parking is different then a normal drive going sleep, it uses it's own internal timer that parks the heads after just 8 seconds of idle time.  The problem is actually caused by the drives being OS drives, because 8 seconds of idle times happens a lot on an OS drive, but the drive is also used a lot more so it has to park and unpark the heads way to often.



setting it to 30 seconds negates most o fthe power saving features of the drive. The faq states some utilities and linux operating systems don't play well with a feature. it's no defect. It's the damned reason people buy the drive. No it wont reduce life when properly used as designed or when you make sure all linux operating systems and utilities are patched to work properly with the drive.

this is no different that having to add in sata drivers before installing windows xp. The software you're using isn't playign well with the new features of the hardware you're using. That doesn't mean ditch all new features. It means make sure the software you're using is compatible with the hardware you're using. Simple as.


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## W1zzard (Apr 21, 2011)

silkstone said:


> Thanks. That makes sense, i should have known that, but i didn't realize a drives lifetime was based on the Load Cycle Count. What exactly is load cycle count in laymans terms? i'm assuming it means the amount of times the disk has been spun up to full operating speed and the heads moved in to position?



these drives have a special power saving mechanism that moves the head in the park position if no accesses for 8 seconds. according to wd the mechanism is estimated to be good for 300k cycles. of course this is just an estimate, yours could fail after 1 million or 10 million cyles or just right about now ^^


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## newtekie1 (Apr 22, 2011)

yogurt_21 said:


> setting it to 30 seconds negates most o fthe power saving features of the drive. The faq states some utilities and linux operating systems don't play well with a feature. it's no defect. It's the damned reason people buy the drive. No it wont reduce life when properly used as designed or when you make sure all linux operating systems and utilities are patched to work properly with the drive.
> 
> this is no different that having to add in sata drivers before installing windows xp. The software you're using isn't playign well with the new features of the hardware you're using. That doesn't mean ditch all new features. It means make sure the software you're using is compatible with the hardware you're using. Simple as.



It would hardly negate most of the powr savings, setting it to 30 seconds would still give a huge power savings compared to a drive that doesn't park the heads at all, and compared to a setting of 8 seconds would probably not make any really power difference.

Oddly enough, in your example ditching the new features was the solution, hence why "IDE mode" was implemented.:shadedshu


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## silkstone (Apr 22, 2011)

95Viper said:


> It is not FUD or un-founded rumor or any other BS.
> And, I am not pointing fingers, but some need to check facts for themselves before they make posts that dispute the facts.:shadedshu
> 
> Just because it has not happened does not mean it could not.  Read the WD FAQs!
> ...



Sorry i should have been clearer, i was trying to say that WD Greens having a higher failure rate is a rumor.
The problem with head parking does exist, and i did research it before buying my WD green. However the problem seems to be limited to Unix Operating systems which don't support the drive.


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## Derek12 (Apr 22, 2011)

Speaking about parking and load/unload cycle count.
My Toshiba MK3265GSX (laptop HD used on desktop computer) is constantly parking/unparking. In SMART says that:

Load/Unload Cycle Count: 11568
Power-On Time Count: 858



Is this normal? because I don't read about Toshiba having that flaw of WD but I get a lot of clicking (head parking) and microfreezes when this happens.

Many thanks


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## newtekie1 (Apr 22, 2011)

Yes, head parking has been a power saving feature in laptop drives for a long time, it is normal.


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## silkstone (Apr 22, 2011)

Derek12 said:


> Speaking about parking and load/unload cycle count.
> My Toshiba MK3265GSX (laptop HD used on desktop computer) is constantly parking/unparking. In SMART says that:
> 
> Load/Unload Cycle Count: 11568
> ...



Tbh i don't think you should be hearing clicking sounds. Furthermore, your OS should be loaded to ram so there should also be no freezing. Google the serial of your drive and add failure/dead/dying at the end to find out what the symptoms of your drive dying would be.

So far i have been pretty unlucky with Hard drives, i lost one pretty randomly that was a 500GB Samsung, then i got an instant replacement. Then a month later, a colony of ants decided to setup shop in the replaced Samsung and started to burrow through my Seagate. Needless to say the Samsung wasn't too happy with these acquired guests and decided to quit in protest.


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## Regeneration (Apr 22, 2011)

Some of you are missing the point.

The point is Intellipark combined with some 3rd party software (FileZilla for example) on all OSes could boost the Load/Unload Cycle Count.

Why should you care? Greens have a limited lifetime of 300,000 cycles (theoretically).

In my personal case, my WD10EARS was getting 31 cycles per hour just idling to desktop with 2 background applications on with Intellipark enabled. According to this ratio, the HDD will fail in 403 days - just doing nothing (300,000 / 31).

Here is a S.M.A.R.T screenshot of some dude from OverclockersUK. He said he's using the HDD just for storage purposes on Windows 7.







According to the data (154769 / 4393 is 35 cycles per hour), his HDD could fail in the next 6 months, and that's just after only 6 months of use (4393 hours are 183 days).


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## W1zzard (Apr 22, 2011)

how many hours a day did the use those drives?


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## Widjaja (Apr 22, 2011)

Derek12 said:


> Speaking about parking and load/unload cycle count.
> My Toshiba MK3265GSX (laptop HD used on desktop computer) is constantly parking/unparking. In SMART says that:
> 
> Load/Unload Cycle Count: 11568
> ...



Yes, my HP mini makes those noises all the time when in sleep mode or if I am say watching a movie off an external data source.

Although the micro freezes are not normal.


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## Regeneration (Apr 22, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> how many hours a day did the use those drives?



Hard to tell. But according to S.M.A.R.T, maybe ~6-7 hours per day (Not sure). You're the math expert .


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## Derek12 (Apr 22, 2011)

Yeah it makes some sort of clicking/scratching noise specially when it is idle but it is driving me nuts 
Can it be disabled? the microfreezes happen mostly at games, when I game, I sometimes heard that click noise very often and the game stutters when the noise occurs 

Thanks


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## btarunr (Apr 22, 2011)

Didn't WD's response nail your assertions?


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## Regeneration (Apr 23, 2011)

btarunr said:


> Didn't WD's response nail your assertions?



WD will get a reply soon backed with facts.


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## Widjaja (Apr 29, 2011)

I just bought a WD20EARS.
Looks l;ike the load cycle count is going to be easily higher than the WD Black.
Whether it causes issues or not we will have to see.


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