My Passport Ultra Activity LED Indicator Light Hangs

[Sjwolf]

I have several My Passport Ultra 1TB portable hard drives that I use to backup various media files (mp3, mp4, avi). They are the PC versions that I’ve reformatted for use with my Mac. (Mac OS Extended)

I’ve notice that on one of the drives the activity LED light pauses or hangs while the drive is being read / written to. Hopefully, that is the right set of terms. What I mean to say is if I’m backing up files or playing those files directly from the external drive, instead of blinking constantly, the light will occasionally stay solid for a second or two.

If I’m listening to an mp3 or watching a video playback is not interrupted. After transferring files the folder size is exactly the same as the original.

I’ve ran verify in disk utility on the drive and it says everything appears to be fine. I’ve never dropped the drive or removed it improperly.

I tried asking WD support directly, but they weren’t any help and didn’t even respond to my last inquiry.

Does anyone know why the LED would pause like this? TIA

[klamation]

@Sjwolf It’s probably nothing to worry about. I wonder if your drive is configured for caching. That could affect how it’s handling disk IO and might cause the light to glow longer.

Open Disk Management (on Win8.1/10 right-click Start, choose Disk Management) and right-click the drive in the lower half list and choose Properties. There’s a tab marked Policies with two options.

Quick Removal is typically configured for USB drives, as it allows you to quickly unplug them with limited data loss. It means any writing is done immediately, which can take longer short-term, but is safer if you tend to unplug your drive frequently.
Better Performance enables write caching, which means Windows could claim it is done using the drive but is still accessing it in the background. This can help overall performance, as Windows will access the drive when it is ready to do so.

For your drives, check and see how they are configured and you’ll probably find the LED one is different from the others.

(I’m probably doing a bad job at explaining caching; apologies for that!)