Hey there,
I just purchased an internal WD Blue 2TB HDD for my laptop, and I’ve noticed that everyday when I start the laptop it constantly does something even though Windows reports no activity on the disk whatsoever (it sounds like constant & fast seeking or accessing)
I rebooted in BIOS mode to see if Windows was the culprit, but even in BIOS I can clearly hear the constant and fast activity sound coming from the disk.
I checked the drive’s surface and there are no bad sectors. More so, the drive reaches 50°C temps indicating intense activity, the sound from it indicates intense activity, but Windows reports no activity at all! I’ve never experienced something like this before with other drives 
Someone said elsewhere that the drive’s firmware might be doing something, but what is it doing all the time, every single day, and so intensively?
[edit: this happens every day when I start the laptop, and takes several hours for the intense activity to stop, even when in BIOS]
1 Like
Really nobody has any idea?
I’ve noticed a few things in the meantime: if I delete 3GB of data, for example, the disk activity will persist for at least 5 minutes while both Windows’ Task Manager & Resource Monitor show no activity on the disk whatsoever, and to confirm this I rebooted in BIOS and the disk activity kept going!
Problem is, even though a deletion is quick, whatever the disk is doing afterwards in the background brings it to 50°C or more - it feels like the hdd’s Firmware is defragmenting the disk after every operation, and whatever it does it keeps on doing even when I’m in BIOS, which sounds like overkill for the drive, and it’s affecting its temperature & speed
What bothers me most is that SMART doesn’t reflect the extra reads/writes that I can clearly hear, and the only indication that there’s persistent disk activity is its temperature slowly going up to +50°C even though all operations had finished a long time ago!
1 Like
Thank you for your reply and findings!
So, does this basically mean I’ve gotten a bad new drive from factory? Even if the deep surface scan I’ve done showed no bad sectors whatsoever?
Gosh I wish I had just stayed with Seagate, even if they start getting bad after 2 years but at least they have really cool temps and function at maximum speed, as opposed to this one that’s always doing something in the background and gets hot even if I don’t use it at all - I doubt it will last more than a year under these daily conditions
But isn’t this feature significantly shortening the lifespan of the drive from the constant disk activity and the high temps? I cannot imagine the stress it puts on the disk’s head - I thought features were meant to improve things, not ruin the whole product (unless this is on purpose to shorten its life and make people buy more drives)
1 Like
hi ursanrazvan, can you explain what ‘this feature’ is, that you mentioned above?
That feature is called SMR, and below are its downsides (which severely impact read & write performance in my WDBlue’s case):
When the HDD becomes idle, it will enter a reorganization mode where the old bits of data on the original track will be erased and made fully available for future use. This reorganization mode must occur to completely delete tracks, making the idle time essential for an SMR drive. If an SMR drive is being used heavily for read and writes, it will not have enough time to reorganize the magnetic tracks, causing the tracks with the old data to remain temporarily. As a result, the SMR drive may need to write new data and reorganize the old track at the same time, resulting in a negative impact on the overall read/write performance.
For many applications it’s because SMR drives place tracks more closely together than their CMR counterparts. This does not significantly impact read speed, but it has a significant impact on write. In order to write to one track, the HDD has to perform an operation equivalent to a program/erase cycle on an SSD. This takes a significantly longer period of time than a standard HDD (which isn’t exactly fast) and it hits the performance of these drives hard in write-heavy workl
Writes is where the SMR mess starts to break down. Data is in layers like on a shingled roof so when you need to erase something and reload it you have to reload the whole section because SMR drives can only read an individual shingle, not write one. This means the drive has to copy the good data to another empty section, delete the existing section, and then rewrite it incorporating the new data.
As a consequence, whenever I write GB of data, it will start chaotically erasing/moving temporary data around even when in BIOS mode, resulting in read/write speeds of MAX 1 MB/s, which is horrendous, thus rendering the drive unusable for tenths of minutes.
The problem is, this happens EVERY time, not just when idle as they officially stated 
P.S. and apparently it’s super hard here to find non-SMR laptop drives (aka CMR)
1 Like
