Brand new MyBook Duo 12TB is constantly showing disk activity. I’ve had it for over 2 weeks, and the LED on the front is constantly in a “steady breathing” pattern indicating drive activity. Windows task manager confirms this.
ProcMon is showing constant queries from the WDDriveService.exe and WDDriveUtilitiesHelper.exe
I tried uninstalling all WD utilities, and the disk still shows constant activity. Is this expected? It seems to be preventing the device from sleeping, and from unmounting/ejecting cleanly.
This doesn’t appear to be related to RAID rebuilding or formatting, as the LED blinking pattern doesn’t indicate that sort of activity.
If this is normal external drive behavior, what impact does this 2% to 22% drive activity have on device longevity?
Find out if you have anything which might put the network line “dormant”. I recently moved my NAS to another room, and introduced a powerline network to the path from NAS to router/switch. After this the NAS started constant activity (which it never did before the move).
After some tinkering, I found that the Powerline adapter was set to a “power save” mode which put it to sleep if no activity from the ethernet for 10 mins. On de-activating this mode the NAS settled down again within an hour or two…
…my guess is that there’s something which the NAS does “upon network connect” which was repeating everytime the powerline adapter went to sleep and woke. The NAS itself was probably waking it up (to get NTP or something), or perhaps it woke when a PCs went looking for the NAS?
BTW I turned off the power saving mode on the powerline adapter near the router too (I now only use that setting in the office where i don’t have anything which should need constant network). The adapters are TP_Link, and are good otherwise.
I think it the new design of the LED display state, even for sleeping or accessing the drive, the LED breathing slowly like that. You can try this, access the device for read or write, then wait for 30-60 minutes without access the drive. There should be to vibration from the unit after 30-60 minutes.
