TOSHIBA HDWD260 high load/unload cycles count

[John S]

Hello gurus,

How come that two and a half years old HDD has poor "Power-on time" and "Load/unload cycle count" estimates?



Cheers.

[John S]

what a beautiful forum full of gurus, not a single reply ..

[fzabkar]

https://forum.ru-board.com/forum.cgi?forum=84

[John S]

https://forum.ru-board.com/forum.cgi?forum=84

why?

[fzabkar]

This forum specialises in data recovery. That other board handles data recovery and general storage related questions.

[John S]

Ok thanks. Also let me ask this, how come the very same device i posted above isn't detected by Toshiba by it's serial number.

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[pclab]

Could be a Fake drive.
Happened to me with WD drives already

[John S]

What does it mean "fake" exactly. Handmade from China?

[John S]

Also, are these down peaks because of SMR or it signals device is about to fail soon?

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[Arch Stanton]

Also, are these down peaks because of SMR or it signals device is about to fail soon?

First of all, define 'soon'. Yes the drive will fail 'soon', somewhere within now and the next ten years.

We're not psychics, at least I am not.

Maybe something else is accessing the hard drive periodically, some SMART monitor for example. I have seen polling SMART can have varying effect on drive depending on drive models. One drive while scanning polling SMART has negligible effect, on other you get spikes like you see. It's not inherent so SMR perse, I don't see these spikes on my SMR drives.

My guess, with this little info/data no one can provide you with a definitive answer.

[John S]

thank you for your reply, so you don't think this is SMR or health related issues?

this is not accessing device by another software, i think i have a guees it might be because of expansion pcie sata card with 15 other devices plugged in.

what about "fake" drives, what are they?

p/s "fail soon" means fail in the nearest future, counted by weeks maybe months.

[fzabkar]

Code:

#       Serial Number   Part Number     Status
1       123FAKE1S9WG    HDKPC32ZKA01S   In warranty. Exp Date: 02-APR-25

[John S]

yeah .. and ?

[fzabkar]

Toshiba's warranty checker accepts fake serial numbers and tells the user that the drive is in warranty ...

FWIW, your drive was manufactured on Dec 3, 2020, according to your serial number.

[pepe]

such spikes can occur due to multitasking OS as well...

[fzabkar]

I suspect that the dips and the high load/unload cycle count have a common source, but that's a discussion for another forum.

[pepe]

spikes can also be due to smart autosave but after a few seconds of calculations, it came to me that they are about 8000 seconds from eachother, which would be quite rare for smart autosave, however, i have not made intensive analysis of these tosh drives so far.

The load-unload cycle count gives a roughly 90 second interval, which could be an APM setting. If the smart autosave is set to the same interval, drive might be loading-unloading in every 90 seconds. This is another possibility. I would consider this a FW bug or a very bad habit at least, as load-unload cycles do some abrasion on the parking ramp. I have seen plastic dirt accumulation on the head arm tips that make contact with the ramp, which could contaminate the HDA after some level. On the other hand, the filter should be able to capture these particles for a lot more cycles.

Briefly, we are only guessing and you probably won't find an answer for these quiestions unless you go really really deep. What you could try is to modify APM settings or disable smart attr autosave and listen for load-unload sounds, of course first listen without any changes and try to measure the period.

pepe

[fzabkar]

I would record the SMART attributes, then restart the system the system and let it sit at the BIOS setup screen for 1 hour. Then reboot and record the SMART settings again. This should tell us if the drive or OS/software are responsible for the load/unload counts.

BTW, I don't think you meant 8000 seconds.

[pepe]

BTW, I don't think you meant 8000 seconds.

i did. the full scan took about 40000 seconds and there are 5 equal intervals. of course, it is a rough estimation, could be 9000 as well.

[John S]

What you could try is to modify APM settings or disable smart attr autosave and listen for load-unload sounds, of course first listen without any changes and try to measure the period.

How can i modify these settings and what are they? Secondly, actually i don't hear any abnormal sounds, in fact the drive is totally quiet. For sure i do not hear head parking every 90 seconds