Green Series (WD5000AADS) freezes system seemingly at random for up to 3 minutes

brokeface · October 15, 2015, 1:23am

My WD5000AADS will hang at while booting into Windows and then seemingly at random during normal operation. The hard drive read light will become solidly lit and computer will not respond for about 1 to 3 minutes. This has happened while browsing the web, in games, and just while idling at the desktop. I have tried reformatting the drive and the problem persists. I have tried installing windows to an alternate and the problem goes away but will reappear when using the problem drive as the boot drive. I have ran all the test on the WD Lifeguard program and the drive passed them all. I should still be under warranty.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

System specs:

Intel i5

ECS P55H-a mobo

4gb GSkill RAM

nvidia GTX 260 vidcard

Other drives:

WD10EADS for storage (problem persists whether or not this drive is connected)

WDJeremy · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Did the drive pass both the S.M.A.R.T. and Extended Tests? If so, have you updated your BIOS and SATA controller drivers to the latest offered by the computer/motherboard manufacturer? Have you tried the drive within a different computer?

brokeface · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Thanks for your reply. The drive passed all SMART and extended tests.

I will try your suggestions and let you know how it turns out.

I have also found others with the same problem here

Bob_S · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

I’ve got this identical problem with a WD10EADS and Windows XP installed in an HP Pavilion a1310n that takes a very long time to boot up and then randomly stalls/pauses for 10/30 seconds with the HD LED burning on. When the machine stalls nothing can be done, and then it returns, the light goes out and it operates normally until next time. I thought it was a NTFS problem, but have gotten CHKDSK to declare the drive clean, but my problem still persists. The drive passes all the WD diagnostics, but the system still randomly pauses. Task manager reports 99% idle, the HD LED is lit solid, and the system is completely frozen(no response to mouse clicks, CTL-ALT-DEL etc.) for up to a minute or two before the LED goes out and the system returns to normal. It happens randomly and is a real nuisance when it does if you’re in the middle of an online game.

Did you ever resolve your problem? I’ve seen others reporting similar things that usually result in an RMA or a drive swap, but no resolutions or explanations as to what is happening.

tarakgor · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

I have a similar problem. Just bought WD Passport 1 TB just 2 days ago. Just 10 mins after, i connect that to my laptop, the system freezes. Any luck what to do …?

Wizzzzard · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

I don’t know if the problem has been fixed but when i brought 2 of these 640gb green drives to run in a RAID0 2 years back, they turned out to be real dodgy causing random system lockups, I would be playing an online fps game having a firefight and my system would suddenly freeze for a short period and then unfreeze only to find that I have died.

It took me three months of hair pulling and stress levels that nobody should ever experience, for me to diagnose my random lockups and i couldn’t believe it when it turned out to be the WD Green hard drives causing the problems all along, I RMA’d the drives thinking that one must be faulty but the new replacement drives were no different and my random lockups remained, I ended up putting one of the useless things in my mothers computer thinking the drives had a problem running in RAID0 but my mother then started having her Windows install, Kiodia and other games locking up randomly all the time.

I assumed that the problem would be fixed quick smart but If you do a google search you will see many posts about random lockups with everyone involved running a green drive scratching their heads in confusion, another major hard drive manufacturer has been having a very similar problem with their drives, I have come to the conclusion that the green drives are useless for running windows and playing games.

I would recommend that if you already own one and are having this problem that you only use it as an external backup drive!

WIZz

huma79 · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

There are tons of people with this same problem using this drive… many threads here and other forums.

example:

http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/62776-hdd-freezing-periodically.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/76226-intermittent-hanging-no-cpu-usage-but-100-hdd.html

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/WD5000AADS-frozen-in-windows-xp/td-p/20150

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/WD-Caviar-Green-slow-performance/m-p/51696/highlight/true#M2556

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/253811-32-problem-wd5000aads-32mb-cache

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20091217081457250&board_id=1&model=P6TD+Deluxe&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=712746

http://www.avforums.com/forums/sky-hd-sky-3d/1119395-problem-wd5000aads-thomson-hd-box.html

The best solution is just to buy a different brand, and spread the word about WD drives.

Zibu_ · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Got the same problem with the same drive. First thing it takes ages to load windows, and then at random times it just hangs. All tests come as passed, and drive works fine for most of the time, just locks up every now and then at random times. It’s extremely annoying.

huma79 · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Zidu, basically you’ll just have to trash it and buy a new drive… I did over the weekend and my computer is blazing fast for the first time in months!

EvertCMOS · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Hi There,

Same problem here with a WD10EADS. Come to think of it: ALL hits I found on the interweb for this Freeze issue were on WD drives. Send an email to WD, but they don’t care as it’s an OEM one . Great service guys: Like I’m going to get any feedback from the computer vendor (ACER) for this hard to reproduce-harder to diagnose problem. System just out of (ACER) warranty. All I asked for was some help, maybe a firmware update…

What’s funny: the quick test from WD DLGDIAG cancels the problem! Not a good workaround but it was usefull two times while I was typing this.

This problem has cost me a lot of spare time trying to fix. Needless to say that WD is OUT. Unfortunately I just bought an external WD drive to back up my stuff so I could do a fresh install to try and solve the issue.

“Spread the word” is a good idea, I’m sure I will!

Evert

badsykes · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

Did you guys checked this mark “Turn off windows write-caching buffer flushing on the device” and restart the PC.I had similar problems with 2 Caviar Blacks 640gb and 1TB and after 1 year of searching i checked that mark and the system never freezed again…

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Possible-solution-for-freezing-and-other-problems-with-caviar/m-p/38033

here is my full explanation…Good luck

EvertCMOS · October 15, 2015, 2:45am

@ badsykes: yes I tried that, but this didn’t help.

Got my new HDD yesterday (Samsung F3) Problem has gone. In fact the PC has never been so smooth. This means that the Western Digital HDD was probably bad from the start, causing random hickups/delays. WD is aware of this issue (it’s posted on their own user forum with response from WD staff: WDJeremy) and it is present in several models. However, there’s no answer from WD on root causes let alone solutions. This means that it can pop up in any of their current and future HDD models: So don’t by WD dirves ans spread the word

Also don’t buy windows (not that this is really possible). There was NO error message or any diagnostics that could be used to pinpoint this issue. Instead I had to roam the inter-web for clues. I bet there are many PC users out there with a faulty WD drive that didn’t realise it’s the WD drive that causes their problem. Maybe they are even not aware of the issue: At first I didn’t knew I had a problem because a slow performing PC with Windows is “normal”.