hi

i had a drive last year which was how you described.
my system would be fine for some time then lock
up for minutes on end trying to read the drive before
suddenly returning back to normal.

it was a WD 1TB EADS drive. ultimately i returned
it to the vendor and got a samsung instead. I am
not suggesting it's your WD drive though.

you can test each drive in turn with HDTUNE
(windows) or hdparm (linux) to see if your
problem is the same as what i experienced.
if it's similar your performance
will look like this (@imageshack)

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/15/hdtune2j.jpg/

BTW, i used windows to demonstrate the issue
since they don't really support anything else
at the customer help desk which you may
discover.

good luck

bye

A long shot, but I found that the AMD IDE/SATA drivers can cause issues. On my current Phenom 2 machines they break the standby / hibernate feature.

So from there on I never load any AMD HDD drivers, just let Windows look after that and I never had any issues.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

A long shot, but I found that the AMD IDE/SATA drivers can cause issues. On my current Phenom 2 machines they break the standby / hibernate feature.

So from there on I never load any AMD HDD drivers, just let Windows look after that and I never had any issues.

I do not use the Hibernate/Sleep Modes, I always disable these.

Could that be an issue with the AMD North/Southbridge driver packs ???

I take it you uninstall these and use the default Windows 7 driver package instead ???

I actually wonder if one of your HDDs could be getting flaky. I've seen that kind of long pause before on writes and it was a defective drive.

WD is completely awesome about returns though. You can do an advance RMA right on their web site without so much as a phone call. Or just a standard RMA (you ship first) if you don't want to give them your CC#.

swaaye wrote:

I actually wonder if one of your HDDs could be getting flaky. I've seen that kind of long pause before on writes and it was a defective drive.

WD is completely awesome about returns though. You can do an advance RMA right on their web site without so much as a phone call. Or just a standard RMA (you ship first) if you don't want to give them your CC#.

I'm thinking it may indeed be one of the HDD's.

It means I have to do some moving around of data first, the two drives I would test first are my VM drive, a WD and my games drive, also a WD.

The 250GB is my oldest drive of course 😀

The times that I have encountered this, it was almost always the hard drive itself that was the problem.

WD do have diagnostic software which you can download. There are versions for Windows and for booting from a CD.

Thanks for all the tips, I will look further into this problem.

Hopefully it is only one HDD acting up, but I will have to start narrowing things down and see if I can isolate this issue.

I will have to move my VM hdd files over to my boot drive and remove that WD 250GB drive.

I can always just take my gaming HDD out of the system for a few days as I have a dedicated gaming machine for that purpose.

If you really want to know if your HDD is healthy or not, try Hard Disk Sentinel.

Mind you, it only detects hardware problems, not logical (i.e. file system, etc).

You problem are those LAME WD HDD's. I had a 1TB one and it was a nightmare experience. Get rid of WD from your system and it will work fine.

There is no BIOS/Windows/firmware setting that can help you with this. Don't bother looking... I had similar poor performance (with win7pro/X64) and if the computer went to sleem mode and you woke it the wd hdd was not accessible (was stuck in sleep mode forever...)
MS created a patch for it that is now availabe in SP1 for windows7 ...
IMHO the real cure is to remove those hdd's...

keropi wrote:

You problem are those LAME WD HDD's. I had a 1TB one and it was a nightmare experience. Get rid of WD from your system and it will work fine.

I'm not sure what the problem is with WB, if there is any.

I think every manufacturer has some good and some bad batches.
Btw, I prefer the Samsung drives, I don't like WD because the part numbers are so much harder to decypher and when I buy a part, I'd like to know exactly what's inside of it 😉

Too bad Samsung is gonna quit the harddrive business though, I'm sure gonna miss those quiet, fast and cheap Spinpoints.

hi

i think you are referring to the WDIDLE Dos tool
which stops the WD drives parking the heads
every two seconds. i tried that on my WD EADS
drive and although it stopped the parking and
`Load_Cycle_Count' didn't increase by the 1000s
every hour it didn't solve the problem with the
drive freezing randomly. Personally I am not
buying another WD drive until I am totally
satisfied they actually work as advertised.

cya

I have a WD10EACS that I've never bothered to reduce parking on and it's been fine for ~3 years. I'm also one of the people who had a IBM Deathstar 75GXP work for about 6 years.

It really is impossible for a user to judge a brand or a line of drives because a tiny sample set is totally meaningless. I tend to watch the reviews on Newegg. If a drive has 1000 reviews with a 50% RMA rate, well that is a reliable warning sign I think.

Actually from what I've seen of studies the HDD companies have rather equal reliability (or unreliability). Google released a study on this. There have been forum posts by IT managers of huge companies buying thousands of drives that say the same.

But all else being equal, I'd rather pick the quietest drive. For me this was the Spinpoint. It's easy to figure out what exact model you're getting, it's the reason I first tried a Spinpoint.

Funny thing is, the loudest drive I've ever heard was an old 8.4GB Spinpoint. It was SO DAMN LOUD, I wanted to put a SANDBAG on top of it!! Dreadful, but the bugger is still working 🤣

Truth be told I've had about the same failure rate with all manufacturers I've purchased from.

I have WD and Seagate along with a single Hitachi in my File Server machine and Samsung and Kingston SSD in my gaming rig.

The gaming rig uses a pair of Samsung 1TB in a RAID Zero config for gaming and the Kingston SSD for Windows 7 Booting.

I think the only HDD manufacturer I had consistent probelms with was CONNER...

I'm sure you folks remember that brand.

Hell, I still have a working Seagate 48MB SCSI-I HDD from my Amiga days and last time I connected the drive up it booted fine into AmigaDOS v2. This is after being dropped a couple of times too.

I no longer have my old Miniscribe nor my Micropolis SCSI drives, unless I packed them away in the attic and have not looked for years 😜

hi

the EADS has more than it's fair share of disgruntled
users. their constant clacking is enough to make anyone
go mad. they suck.

talking of deathstars i bought 6 and 1 is still working today

> grep IBM /var/log/boot.msg
<4>hda: IBM-DTLA-305020, ATA DISK drive
<4>hdc: IBM-DTLA-305020, ATA DISK drive

the first one works which is good since it's the root
drive the other died sometime within the last 1727 days
and has gone the way of 4 others over the last 10
years.

> uptime
8:35pm up 1727 days 1:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(this machine is now out of service yet still online. it's a PII-400
on a supermicro p6sba, been in service since 98 or
thereabouts)

cya

I'm in the process of testing this issue now, this is what I found out so far:

1) The old WD 250GB HDD was not the culprit, it was disconnected from the system and the issue still occured.

2) Now removed the WD 1TB from the system and checking if this occurs again.

The only WD drive left is my boot/host drive, the Velociraptor 300GB.

I know this HDD was working just fine in my gaming rig at the main os host/boot drive before I swapped it out with an SSD.

I will post if I can narrow it down further.

EDIT: Well it appears that the issue could be my boot drive, does seem strange as I never had any issues with it while connected to my gaming rig.

I am going to try first moving it over to my dedicated Promise SATA controller board and boot from there and see if that helps or not.

Maybe getting it onto it's own host adapter will help out.

OK, I just used Acronis True Image to copy my Windows 7 HDD over to another 1TB drive.

Shutdown the machine and then disconnected the original HDD and reconfigured the new one for booting, seems to be working fine for the moment but time will tell.

So far nothing the DISK I/O issues have not occurred, but I will keep an eye on things this week and see.

EDIT: Well one day has passed and I have yet to see a single Disk I/O lock with Windows 7.

I will run it beyond the Memorial Day Weekend to see how things run but so far so good.

Well it has been 1 week plus and the Disk I/O issue has not occured since imaging my Boot/OS drive to another one and removing the original from the onboard SATA controller.

The interesting thing is I imaged from this WDC drive onto another WDC drive, a 1TB, RE3 drive and it works fine.

It would appear that my 300GB Velociraptor has some problems or perhaps it needs an firmware update.

I'm going to leave it for another week or two and then investigate further, probably need to check out WDC's tech support KB on this issue.