WD20EARS - freezing and no read/write for 30 seconds

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I purchased a WD20EARS a week ago for a media storage device.

While playing video in Windows Media Player, the video would lock up.  At first I thought it was a video problem but I also noticed that my video encoding on the hard drive would stop.  This also causes gaps in Recorded TV shows.  (the biggest problem, as the first two don’t cause data loss). Checking Resource Monitor showed that there was no read/write activity going on.

I’ve looked and seen that  this is a not uncommon problem.  Some suggested turning off Windows write-cache buffer flushing.  This didn’t work on my drive.

Are there any other solutions that might work, short of bt another drive/RMA?  This isn’t a system drive, so performance isn’t really an issue.

*Update*  I should add that Resource Monitor shows the read/write activity of zero and the blue line (which I assume is disk access) goes to 100%, so it’s like the disk is thrashing but doing nothing and then it clears up.

2

I’m pretty sure by now that it’s the drive and I haven’t found a way to prevent it.

So I’ll be ordering a non-Western Digital drive and returning this one.  I own bunches of WD drives (3 in my wife’s computer, 2 in mine) but this error, which seems to be a not uncommon one without a solution, makes me think I’ll go back to using drives from some other company.

3

No one has any idea how to prevent the disk access from going to 100%?

This has been happening since the drive was new, so it seems like terrible QA process from WD.

4

Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Regards,