Hi,

I need to wipe some Hitachi Ultrastar 1 TB hard drives from 2008 before selling them.
The model is HUA721010KLA300.
(On the HDD is also written EMC P/N 118032579. They from a Synology RackStation RS812.)

The S.M.A.R.T. indicators are all ok, but applying the shred command to one of these drives is incredibly slow.
After about half an hour, only about 6 GB were erased, whilst the hard drive is connected to a SATA (III) port.

Another strange symptom I observed with Windows 7 installed on this drive, is that when the computer was idle, the hard drive was very noisy, lîke the headstack assembly was repositionning constantly. When moving the mouse to make Windows get out of its idle state, the drive always became quite again.

I assume some firmware issue.
It appears that I'm not the only one facing this problem. (see https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/hdd-slow-firmware-update.3215644/ )

Altough Ultrastar is a family of professional drives, I couldn't find a support page for this drive.
All support documents now redirect to Western Digital website and I cannot find any dedicated page for the old A7K100 serie.

I was expecting some equivalent of Seagate's Seatool but for Hitachi, so that I could easily update the firmware.

Is there any simple solution without using specific hardware ?

N.B. I also observe that these drives get very hot when some intense activity is done on them, either reading or writing, the temperature reaching around 55°C.

Probably PCB has some failure. I am not sure but some defect list taple problem or some firmware problem could make it. I am not sure. Or
Sometimes its about computer. My computer has many ( 8 ) Sata slot. 1 slot making overhead tempure whichever hdd I connect there. If your computer has more extra connection part , you can try some other SATA and power connection. Or you can try external case if you have.

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