I have a 500g WD blue WD5000AAKS and this morning started constantly thrashing.
I have Windows 7 64 installed on it and assumed it was just paging at first, but the sound is different. It makes the same sound all the time. Hard to describe but it sounds as though a virus checker is running on it constantly.
Anyway I disabled anything that I thought could be causing it, AVG, pagefile, media streaming yet it still does it.
The drive is about 3 months old. Everything is fine, feels fine and Windows reports no errors, the same for the WD data lifeguard diagnostic. There is nothing in the resource monitor that I can see would be causing this either.
After spending a good few hours trying to work out what is going on I decided to boot up Windows XP, which is installed on a Samsung drive in the same PC.
The WD drive is still making the thrashing noise, even with it just sat there doing nothing. No errors reported again from software this time from XP.
If I use the drive for anything the thrashing stops and does whatever I just asked it to do, but as soon as it’s done it will return to the thrashing.
It’s highly annoying, so much that I may have to unplug it from my PC because nothing I do will stop it. Is the drive failing?
Well, you’ve done the right diagnostics, booting it in XP as a slave drive.
The behaviour sounds a bit like what I read on a webpage of a drive recovery company (in Germany?) where they have sounds you could playback of drives they had received. I recall there was one for a drive that was constantly trying to seek to its home sector or something.
You’ve used the DLG, but I found that Hard Disk Sentinel (hdsentinel.com) gave me more information. You can see the history over time of crucial attributes. You might see some attribute climbing, which would be interesting to know. It’s free.
well my theory is… if you have good luck you have an hard drive that lasts long…
i have an old 500GB SE16 revision ( seems that is 3 platter 166gb manufactured in May 2007 )
i bought in september 2007 and im very happy with the drive
( its even before the blue edition apears but its considered in the blue line)
the warranty seems that have expired in 6/31/2010 lol
but is still working great yyaaayyy loooooool
here are some screenshots
i trust this drive to all my HD movies and important data that i dont want to loose
i dont have on my main system because is “too little”
the only thing that i noticed is something the cache gets full and it seems very slow for some seconds ( this only happpens when im using for svereal things at once ( i think 16 mb cache for 500gb is awfull but oh well)
just to say that i for example had been lucky to get from a good batch
I have a WD 5000AAV external drive on USB connected to an XP SP3 machine, and have had exactly the symptoms described here for weeks (i.e. it doesn’t go away after 24 hours!). Any access to the disk causes the thrashing to stop and the drive works perfectly (it is used as a backup drive once a week). In fact, I have two identical drives which get swapped over every month, and both do exactly the same thing, and I end up unplugging the USB cable as the noise is so irritating. The noises do change, so clearly the drive is doing different things at different times, but the same ‘patterns’ do come up time and again though.
I have also installed filemon and usbsnoop, and as far as those diagnostics are concerned, there is absolutely no activity from the machine to the disk - and of course as soon as there is, the thrashing stops.
In particular I thought it was interesting that there were absolutely no USB commands of any kind, which I guess would be at a lower level than file access. I can only assume it is some ‘housekeeping’ the drive does whilst idle, but that would need someone from WD to comment - I’m pretty new to these forums so I don’t know whether WD techies frequent them or not, but it would be good to know if there’s a solution…
well My WD5000AAKS-00A7B0 is BROKEN after 5-6 month… but with WD warranty, they replaced my Full of bad sector (according to Data Lifeguard) with WD5000AAKS-00V1A0…
My old WD5000AAKS-00A7B0 is 86 Mb/s
My new WD5000AAKS-00V1A0 is 130 Mb/s… no, no joke even my WD5000AALS (WDC Black) is only 93 Mb/s…
And my old AAKS is look Very different compare to my new AAKS
the good thing bout WDC Black is my warranty expired 2015…
I was reading somewhere that during the drives idle time it will update the smart recording on the drive, probably doing that, also it can remap the drive from some errors during idle time but which is normaly done during disk writes but if there is a fair bit to remap it waits till the drive is idle.
This thrashing would appear to be an wide-ranging issue. Reviewing the thread we have had reports in thse circumstances:
* Windows7 64 bit system disk
* Mac Firewire external drive
* WinXP USB external drive
Consistently, there is nothing coming from the computer to cause the activity, and as soon as there is, the thrashing stops. One poster’s stopped after 24 hours.
Updating S.M.A.R.T info should not take very long, and remapping bad sectors should be in the order of a few minutes.
Really need someone to install a good S.M.A.R.T diagnostic program such as HDDSentinel and watch the pertinent values such as sector errors and read errors.
I would like to add another case of thrashing hard drives. I had two WD5000AAVS in a MyBook Professional II external enclosure which worked fine for some two years. After replacing them by bigger disks I cleaned them with the unix wipe-command.
After that, both drives show the described thrashing. After running them for a continous couple of days, there was no relief. WD’s status tool doesn’t show any errors.
WD’s tool only shows a small sub-section of the available SMART values.
If you are on Windows, can you install HDDSentinel (or any equivalent tool, that’s the one I know and use) and check the SMART values. Look for remapped sectors, Load/Unload cycle counts. If the raw values in HDDSentinel display in hex with lots of leading zeros, right click the column and change to decimal display.
If you are on Unix there must be some equivalent I am sure.
If possible, reformat the drive and see if that helps.
