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
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Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 8:03

Just bought this new hdd for replacing optical drive of my old netbook, what i noticed after installing it with a hdd caddy is that the head parking is happening every 8-15 seconds. Whats making this worse is that not a single software is able to disable its APM (crystaldiskinfo, hddtune pro, quiethdd). Its a good drive with a decent speed and i don't understand how to save it. Some stats
Power on count: 33
Power on hours: 31hrs
Load cycle count: 1410

Is this normal?

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 16:15

Does the same happen with a desktop pc in the same USB? caddy?

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 16:24

If you disconnect the SATA data connector, does the drive still spin down?

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 20:57

scratchy wrote:Does the same happen with a desktop pc in the same USB? caddy?

i dont have any other pc to test on recently.
fzabkar wrote:If you disconnect the SATA data connector, does the drive still spin down?

sorry but i didn't get what you wanna say, please elaborate.

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 21:27

We need to know whether the drive is parking of its own accord after an internal idle timeout, or whether it is being commanded to go into standby mode by the host software or by the firmware in the USB enclosure. If you disconnect the SATA data cable (not the SATA power cable), then any parking activity will be due to the drive's own firmware.

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 22:34

fzabkar wrote:We need to know whether the drive is parking of its own accord after an internal idle timeout, or whether it is being commanded to go into standby mode by the host software or by the firmware in the USB enclosure. If you disconnect the SATA data cable (not the SATA power cable), then any parking activity will be due to the drive's own firmware.

i got it now, Laptops generally don't have SATA/power cables for HDDs, those are usually built in to the motherboard, do you know any way to do this in a laptop?

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 3rd, 2017, 22:50

Can you enter the BIOS setup before the laptop boots? This should eliminate the OS as a suspect.

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 4th, 2017, 4:28

thanks for the replies, the culprit was hdd caddy. I moved the drive from it to the main sata port and everything was fine. Now i have to deal with the mounting bracket's screws as they don't wanna come off then i will try using the oem hdd in the caddy and see if it also suffers from head parking in that caddy. And if it did reacted the same way then i would reserve the caddy for ssd's only and use my old hdd externally with an enclosure.

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 4th, 2017, 17:54

Isn't the caddy just a passive device, ie no electronics?

Re: Constant head parking with ST1000LM048

July 4th, 2017, 18:39

They usually are. Have one in front of me, waiting to be installed.

It would be interesting if the OP posted about the results of trying other disk in this caddy. I have read somewhere ( don´t know if here or elsewhere ) one post when the person stated that the mini-sata ports used for the CD/DVD in notebooks were somehow connect to a slower port in the controller, and that it would make hard disks connected to it run slower.

Have been thinking to test it for some time now, but work always get in the way ...
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