Caviar Green WD15EADS-00P8B0 frequently hangs during writing after some time of use

Hi, I’m having a caviar green 1.5t hdd with about 2.5k hrs of use time. It started OK but recently the drive starts to frequently hang during writing, and it seems only happen in writing. SMART values look perfect, I used HDTune/Victoria to read the sectors and neither showed any error. but whenever I try to download something onto this drive, the drive hangs unexpectably, and it takes usually 20-60 seconds to go back to normal, while during that time the whole drive is completly inaccessible. Funny thing is, if I try to copy some files (large or small, dont matter) from my caviar black or velociraptor drives to this caviar green, it works perfectly, rarely any hangs happen, but if I try to copy files from another (well working) caviar green drive to this drive, it hangs every few minutes…

this really confuses me. anyone having similar problems? I wonder if I should get an RMA on this drive.

thx

OK, just managed to run the victoria write test, no problem at all, yet hangs still happen while copying(from another caviar green) and continuous downloading…

wth…

I have exactly the same problem… I was thinking about the 4k sector problem, but i seems that this model is a 512 sector ( not sure). Does anybody else have this problem ?

Update: the issue worsened and the drive now fails its short self test, by DLGDIAG5, which records the error in its log. Got an RMA #


Yes I have this problem: long delays (minutes) with a WD15EADS-00P8B0, presumably when writing, including under clean XP SP3 (nothing but what the install CD contains). During the stall, the drive activity led is fixed. Problem occurs on different machines (with Amd760G and Intel ICH10 SATA chipsets). Waiting cures the problem with no entry in system logs and no apparent data loss. SMART infos are OK. All tests of DLGDIAG5 pass.

In one recent event the stall occured while I was keying-in the first account name during the XP installation procedure. There was some head-moving-like noise with a long (>1 second) repeat pattern. The problem occured after I made a pause of like a minute, which likely was enough for the drive to unload its head. This might be part of the mechanism that trigger the delay. [WIndows does not put the drive to sleep: that’s not enabled by default].

I have another WD15EADS-00P8B0 with the same FW (01.00A01) and build date (03 SEP 2009), and so far I have not seen such problem with it. I have several WD10EADS and they so far perform fine.

I tried is to align the NTFS partion to 4kiB boundary (using linux’s fdisk): it did not help.

Secure erase of the drive (the closest thing I know to physical format) does not cure the issue (under MHDD: PWD then FASTERASE then WAIT; lasts about 5 hours and a half; FWIW, I got 5h 28’ 13" and 5h 28’ 12" on two tests with the “bad” drive, and 5h 05’ 36" or less on two tests with the “good” drive).

Not sure if yours is one of the drives that parks the heads somewhere around every 8 seconds. Although a parked head shouldn’t cause more than a seconds lag, even a full drive spinup wouldn’t cause minutes long lag that I know of. I could be wrong though.