Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
May 17th, 2019, 2:43
Hi all,
About 2 months ago, I picked up a new WD Red 10TB drive to serve as a backup storage for media and I've been curious about the drive's idling noises.
When the drive is not being accessed, I've noticed that it sometimes makes noises like it's seeking or reading/writing for some data. Sometimes, the head sounds like it's swinging across the whole platter in somewhat 'violent' fashion for like 5-10 seconds and then it stops. I thought the OS was doing this, I use Linux and the drive is formatted XFS if it matters, but I've noticed that the drive does this even when not partitions are not mounted. That's what really surprised me... I assumed the FS driver is doing something and accessing the disk. But it the drive is not mounted, can the OS/driver be excluded as the culprit. I'm beginning to suspect that the drive's firmware is behind this behavior.
Does anyone know what's going on with these drives?
Thanks so much for any insight!
May 18th, 2019, 11:10
Spildit wrote:Yes ... Those noises might be drive writting to SA (firmware) like for example S.M.A.R.T. data ...
Also it might be scanning the surface for bad sectors, etc ... background activity ... But most likely it's just updating firmware data like S.M.A.R.T. tables ...
Interesting... thanks! I had no idea so much was going on. I tend to put it to sleep when I'm not using it. Anything wrong with doing that?
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