HDD continuously in standby mode

Hello,

Since some time the HDD in my laptop has decided to go into standby mode when it’s not being used. The interval between the last drive activity and standby is quite abnormal, sometimes even after a few seconds of inactivity it spins itself down, causing applications and even games to freeze while trying to access the drive.

The HDD power settings in Windows (7) are already set to Never.

Drive model: WDC WD5000BPVT-22HXZT1 (SATA)

Drive serial number: WD-[Deleted]

What could be the cause of this problem?

Thanks in advance.

i recently opened a similar thread about this issue. read it here:

http://community.wd.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/Very-annoying-head-parking-and-spinning-down-of-a-Scorpio-Blue/td-p/574817

short answer:

this is by design and in my eyes a horrible configuration for the drives. also, there is no permanent fix for this, but you can however use quietHDD to fix the APM setting that causes the way to frequent parking of the heads and spin down of the disks. Setting has to be applied every time the computer reboots or returns from standby.

And now just a continuation of my rant (no need to continue reading thomas02):

I don’t get why they can’t design a hdd that can save power optionally, but not permanently by delaying disk access time and shortening the overall lifespan. give options to the customer, don’t enforce it! and get rid of hdidle3 too. there is no need for this, as the HDD standard already incorporates a spindown setting (dunno whats it called, but the -S switch in hdparm sets it)!

you are turning into Apple with all their closed off systems, proprietary connections and necessary adapters for public standards!

Thanks for your reply.

It amazes me that this is by design. Why would WD configure their drives to spindown after a few seconds of inactivity?

I’ve been a happy customer of WD for years (all my drives are WD’s), and none of them have this issue, except this one.

Isn’t it extremely bad for a drive to constantly spin up and down?

This seems to be more of a self-destruct mechanism rather than a “power saving” feature.

Is there any information from WD about this issue, and is there any “official” solution available?

Kind regards,

Thomas

they are keeping quiet about this for years apparently. these drives are meant for laptops and such, so in order to save some valuable power, they park the head and slow down. I somewhat doubt though, that this will even remotely lower power consumptions, as spinning up and unparking also requires additional power… and parking/unparking tends to be in rapid succession with this horrible configuration.

and as i mentioned in my thread: there is no official nor unofficial fix yet. we need a new firmware for these drives to fix it permanently!