Hello. I bought a WD 1TB SATA-III 7200 rpm 64MB Caviar Blue [WD10EZEX] a year ago. Windows reports the model as WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0 ATA DEVICE. All seemed fine, but i started noticing that some games freeze rarely(on average as often as 1 or 2 hours, but depends on the game). At first I didn’t see a connection with the hard drive, but then I noticed that only the games which I have installed in my steam library on this hard drive have this issue(this is my second hard drive, games on my first hard drive NEVER manifested this problem even once).
About the freezing: usually it freezes from 30 to 60 seconds, rarely the game crashes because of this, but there are a few games which just crash because of it. It can happen at loading screens(it takes significantly more - i know when it happens) or ingame… and ingame, it can be an outright long freeze or in some well written games the sound disappears and the textures aren’t streamed anymore(in new areas you can only see the smallest mips of the textures… the texels are huge - after the time is up, the sound gets back to normal and the higher detail textures appear).
Ok, all this “evidence” points to the hard drive. Now I don’t know if it goes to a deep sleep because lack of activity or he needs a driver/firmware update… Anyone on this forum heard something about this or happened to them ? I don’t have errors or anything worse because of it, I only hate those annoying freezes. A few games don’t even freeze on this hard drive ever, but they are very simple games or in one case, a more complex one, Payday 2, which as far as i know it likes to stream a lot of stuff continually… So in conclusion: Is the HDD going to a deep sleep because no activity or what is happening ?
I also have the same long freezes when watching a movie which resides on this hard drive. It also happens rarely, but it seems more often when I seek a lot. I use VLC and I don’t know how it works with the hard drive when playing back. These freezes almost always never work out themselves, I have to kill the VLC process which, very interestingly, cannot even be forcefully killed (taskkill /f) for some time… usually 30-60, the length of the freeze 
and if I try to start another instance of VLC to watch something on this HDD before the time is up, It will start with a black screen… as in, I’m not streaming you anything…
Stuff I had tried:
-
checked that the power management is set on High Performance and the HDD turns off after 60 mins.
-
Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows says everything is ok, the SMART stuff reports perfect values, althought I had not tried a surface test yet, but I have no reason to think about this… never had any bads or badly written stuff or something it couldn’t read.
And it seems I’m not the only one with this problem, I google’d a little and it seems that other folks with this model have the problem too. Thanks and hope to hear something back, ANY suggestion is appreciated.
Edit1: copy paste ate my text formatting
Edit2: I remembered another thing… I should’ve mentioned this because it might be important. I don’t know if this is normal, but from time to time(a few days or mostly weeks), this hard drive starts to make some interesting noises like it’s doing something, but they are very audible and kinda scratchy, high pitched. They aren’t necesarily scarry and they last 10 to 15 seconds. The freezes never occur during when this is happening, the hard disk operates normally when these sounds are heard. From my experience, I had a second hard disk for storage on my old computer and it was also a western digital and it had the same noises like this one, but they only went for 5 seconds at most and were a little less audible. I had no freezes or problems with that one and it still goes fine even today at the person I gave the old PC to. This is why these noises never freaked me out with this hard drive, but you can never know…
