WD20EZRX: Continuous seeking/parking noise when idle

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Dear All,

I bought a 2.0 TB Western Digital Green Hard Drive (WD20EZRX) three days ago. I used it in a docking station as an external HDD and sometimes also with a Mobile Rack in my desktop computer. From the very first day it has kind of a strange behavior in both computers. When it is idle, it starts producing seeking noise or if it was parking and releasing its head three times a second.

The drive is healthy (100%), below is the SMART report from HDD Sentinel.

wd20ezrx.png
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Its temperature is okay, around 25-30 °C max.

There isn’t any problem with the transfer rate. It goes at 25 MB/s in my USB 2.0 docking station and at 50 MB/s in my desktop computer (which is pretty old and has limited bus speed).

No, there is no application that keeps it busy/seeking. It also makes the noise when I unplug the USB connector of the external docking station and also made it when I entered the BIOS on my desktop computer (or when I booted into UBCD), so this seeking noise is independent from any operating system or application on the host computer.

While I was Googling to try to find a solution to this issue, I found some articles and forum posts about the IntelliPark idle timer of Green drives. I also found this.

I downloaded a UBCD with WDIDLE3 to change parking idle timer. First I set it to 300 seconds , turned off the computer, then turned it on again, but the seeking noise remained. Then I booted UBCD again and used WDIDLE3 to disable its parking idle timer. I turned off the computer, then turned it on again but the seeking noise didn’t go away.

So here I am now, WDIDLE3 didn’t change anything, so I haven’t been able to solve the problem. None of my hard drives produce a noise like this. I can feel it beating when I touch the docking station with my hands.

I recorded the sound with my dictaphone, and uploaded to these locations.

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/Csy8oYiFba/noise-when-idle.html

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/x9rHPaYfba/noise-goes-off-when-copying.html

The second one shows how this noise goes off (at 00:04 seconds) when I start using the HDD by copying files from it.

Note that the gain/volume of the recording can be really high, because I put the dictaphone less than a centimeter close to the hard drive. Here is another recording from 30 centimeters far from the HDD.

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/3f8GBKrcce/noise-when-idle-from-30cm.html

What is this? What should I do?

I’m kind of frustrated now, because spent a lot of time collecting all my data from other disks to finally copy them to this big single drive. I hope this issue can be fixed with a firmware upgrade or some official tool. It would be great if I didn’t have to return my new HDD.

Thanks in advance

1 Like
2

Hello,

Take a look at this link. Hope it helps.

How to tell if the noise or sound the drive is making is normal 

Also try running a diagnostic using WD’s DLG.

3

Can you show us a HD Tune read benchmark graph?

I haven’t been able to download your sound samples (4shared.com is an ad infested PITA), but I’m wondering if the activity is related to “Continuous Background Defect Scanning” or “Background Media Scans”. SMART also provides for offline defect scanning. In the latter case, the ATA standard states that “if the device is powered-down before the off-line scan is completed, then the off-line scan shall resume when the device is powered up”.

Here is a WD tech note from 1998 (WD’s current documentation is essentially nonexistent):

Failure Prevention and Data Protection Through Data Lifeguard
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-850105.pdf

How Data Lifeguard Works

"Data Lifeguard automatically identifies and repairs sectors before data loss occurs. It performs off-line read surface scans while the hard drive is idle, and refreshes weak data. The overall hard drive performance is improved because error recovery is performed off-line during idle times. The feature initiates automatically every eight operating hours for daily protection, with the goal of performing one scan per day.

Specifically, after the hard drive has had eight hours of spin time and 15 seconds of idle time, Data Lifeguard performs an off-line scan of all user data sectors. The spin time counts only the time the hard drive is actively spinning. The idle time is defined as the time the hard drive is not performing a host-initiated command. If the off-line scan is interrupted by a host command or power cycle, the scan will resume at the point where it left off after 15 additional minutes of spin time and 15 seconds of idle time. Power cycle and power management events do not reset the spin time counter, and the counter resumes counting after the next spin up."

Note that today’s Data Lifeguard is a software diagnostic tool whereas in 1998 it appears to have been an internal feature of the drive’s firmware.