This is a WD10EZEX, regular WD Blue 1TB drive, it's a year old. First, I ran the WD diagnostic test on it, it passed. It hasn't been overheated, though this rig is left on 24/7, but it doesn't do much work, web browsing and gaming. This issue has creeped up little by little, it's now a regular occurrence. Regardless of what task I'm doing, opening Chrome, playing a game, occasionally the drive just stops responding, the HDD light indicator stays lit, no blinking of any sort, like what would be typical, this lasts anywhere from 5 or so seconds, and very rarely a full minute or so. I don't think it's related to power savings, it can happen at any time no matter what I'm doing. I'm building X99 in about September or so, so I've just dealt with it hoping it would last, until now I felt certain it would. But this morning already it's done this 3 times, it's worrying me. I'm on an extremely tight budget until September. I can say with almost complete certainty it's not malware, or a virus, or anything like that. Any suggestions? The machine has never even blue screened, most reliable rig I've ever owned. :/
If for whatever reason more specs are needed, it's Haswell i5 4440/ 16GB/ GTX 770/ Win 8.1 x64, very basic setup meant to get me through until my new build in a few months. No SSD, extremely generic storage for now, just this single HDD.
Edit: I think about the only thing I can add, this seems to happen more often shortly after the hard drive resuming from being turned off (not sleep) or soon after booting up. I'm at a loss here, going to contact WD just in case, backing everything up.
I actually hadn't thought to do that, I'll try that now, though it may take up to a few days for this to happen again. Thanks, I'm gonna shut down and swap out the cable, I have several still new in the box.
Okay, I swapped out the cable for a new one, double checked power, and switched to a different sata port. We'll see how it go's, thank you very much for the replies.
I don't know if it's just in my head, but things feel faster.. It's probably a cognitive failure on my part, nothing new. Thanks again, I'll report back what happens.
blues are known for doing this as they are the cheapest tier in their product stack. what's happening is to reduce wear on the surface the needle is always resting ( not scanning the surface of the drive stack) so it always waiting for for the disc stacks to spin up so it can float on the air bubble that is created from the spinning disc stack. alot of times what can happen is the reading needle since it's always going back into it's little 'caddy' (away from the disc stack) it can get stuck and become slow to respond since that mechanical part is wearing out from so much sitting. not much you can do but get a better drive or modify the firmware to keep the disc spinning and the reading needle from resting too much. i think you can find this info with a good google search.
Hmm, I'll have to look into that. Most of what I've read or heard about these drives is basically there's virtually no difference between Blue and Black, except a few nuances that I think wouldn't have any bearing on my issue. Totally uncertain. At the office we have tons of these things, both of them, I'm told they perform about the same and fail about the same, but again, this is just hearsay from one of my old IT guys.
I'll have a chat with WD in the meantime, and look around to see if this is common. Thanks.
yep, the only difference is the firmware instructions to how long to keep the disc spinning in idle and how often to 'caddy' the reading needle. but then that's also the only reason why they feel they can charge more for their HD's which is why i only buy HGST or ssd's
Okay, it just happened again, as I tried to refresh this webpage, Chrome stalled for about 8 seconds. It must not be related to the SATA cable, or ports. I got the same error again, and also this one> http://i.imgur.com/7Upv8q0.jpg
Just wrapped up a full scan of WinDlg, WD's HDD tool, no issues. I'm actually more worried now than I was before. I F'd up real bad on my budget, I'm totally broke through September. By then it won't matter, I'm building a new X99 rig, this machine is my life blood right now.. Even WD is clueless, upon calling their support (and fighting my way to an actual educated human being) I was told almost immediately to RMA. This makes me think there's an obvious issue, they barely asked me anything, I told them clearly what was happening, and the error, I was put on hold, 2 mins later, they're asking me to just RMA, now, that, is a first...~!~ This can't be widespread, I know too many people and browse too many forums. Either this guy dropped the ball, or I'm lying to myself.
And I believe what @weare138 is true, but I think he is thinking about the western digital green drives. There is a hardware difference between the blues, reds, and blacks; its not just firmware.
Here watch this
And for the record, HGST drives are basically western digital drives.
HGST, Inc. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital that sells hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.[1] [Source]1
