WD 1TB WD10EACS head park noise

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tawd1992
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WD 1TB WD10EACS head park noise

Post by tawd1992 » Sun Sep 07, 2008 11:10 am

After reading all I could here on this drive it seems this is the quietest 1tb drive & is the one to get if you're not concerned about performance which I'm not.

The only concern I have is that some of the reviews at Newegg talk about a head park noise with this drive after it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.

Could any owners of this drive comment if there is any head park noise or how loud it is if there is any? I'm all set to buy this drive if the head park noise isn't an issue. Thanks.

Iron_Dreamer
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Post by Iron_Dreamer » Sun Sep 07, 2008 1:30 pm

I've never noticed such a noise. The loudest part of my system is a Samsung HD501LJ by a nose over the WD, so I doubt there is anything masking this supposed head-park noise. Now I remember an old 180GXP that had a serious head-park noise!

Kaleid
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Post by Kaleid » Sun Sep 07, 2008 2:32 pm

I think I may have the park noise with my 640GB GP. Neither of the two WD 640GB "blue" drives makes this noise and neither does my sisters WD 500GB GP.

I may have to sell this one and purchase a faster drive without the park noise and place it in a softmounted quietdrive.

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Sun Sep 07, 2008 4:20 pm

Is the park noise loud or something? I have it on my WD GPs but it doesn't bother me in the least. It's a very gentle sound, happening once a few seconds after you stop using the drive. The WD GP spinning constantly in my system almost never have time to park its heads, since I always got a few torrents going.

Kaleid
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Post by Kaleid » Sun Sep 07, 2008 4:24 pm

Actually I don't think that its the park noise anymore. It happens all too often and seems to only happen when there is heavy activity at the end of the disk where the performance is lowest. I can live with it, especially after I placed the GP in a softmounted quiet drive.

For comparison the GP version is much quieter than the normal "blue" 640GB version.

whiic
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Post by whiic » Wed Sep 10, 2008 11:38 am

I have the parking noise present with both of my 1TB GPs. It's not obtrusive and may go completely unnoticed in a typical system. Of course we don't have typical system. I can clearly hear the load and unload clicks. They are slightly more audible than non-AAM seeks... but luckily even non-AAM seeks are quite muted so I'm not talking about a heck of a racket here.

I think it's more muted than parking noise of 7K400. And that wasn't too obtrusive either... way quieter than parking noise of my 7K250. 7K250 is probably the kind of noise Iron_Dreamer's 180GXP made. I can clearly hear parking of 7K250 from other side of appartment, at least within the same floor that is. 180GXP also had the infamous MEOW noise... early 7K250 too. My sample luckily only made a buzzzing noise every 10 minutes... the only downside being that buzzzing lasts many times longer than the banshee scream of 7K250 with older firmware. :p
And 7K400 also has the buzzzing which is about as audible as it's with 7K250.

One might expect 5-platter 7K400 to be noisier when parking than 7K250 but this really is not the case. It must be due to mechanical actuator lock used (instead of magnetic actuator lock used in 7K250). 7K400 also makes a rattling noise when turned upside down and back to upright position. This is probably due to actuator lock type as well.

There's some other HDDs in addition to 7K400 that I remember have made a rattling noise when turned around: Quantum Fireball ST 3.2GB, most laptop drives and if I don't remember incorrectly, I think GreenPower drives make it too... which could imply similarity to 7K400 on this aspect... they do share a lot of other things as well: spindle axle supported from both ends, unload ramps, etc.

With my GPs unload occurs around 10 sec after last disk access. I haven't really timed it as I can't be certain when exactly disk was accessed. HDD activity LED may blink too fast for eyes/brain to react but even single sector read/write will postpone unload.

Compared to unload function in my 7K250 and 7K400, GreenPowers are VERY aggressive in saving power - about notebook like. 7K250 and 7K400 can be manually configured for several timer values for unload and low-rpm mode or disabled altogether... but the most aggressive is still 2 minutes 'til unload (and 10 minutes until low-rpm). With GP, we have a HDD that's in low-rpm always (Hitachi HDDs can only use lower rpm when heads are unloaded) and unloads in matter of seconds with no possibility to make it less aggressive (or disable it altogether).

It may be arguable that disabling it completely could hurt reliability because of more time heads spending flying (=> risk of head crash) but this 10 second time-out value (especially as it's not configurable by user) is quite ridiculous. Because of Windows' access behaviour and SMART monitoring polling interval, it unloads ~once every minute. Of the two WDs I have, the older one is about 1 year old and has 530605 unload cycles so far (as reported by SMART)... that's only a little short of 600000 cycles specified the HDD should be able to withstand. Sure, it'll likely withstand a lot more... but with 3 or 5 years of service life, it's going to be exceeded by a ridiculous amount of unloads.

So, this potential wear-out hazard has been reality with laptop HDDs for years as they have aggressive power saving as well. But fortunately laptops aren't usually used 24/7 so they don't necessarily exceed even the minimum amount of load cycles they're guaranteed to withstand. With GP aimed for quiet computers (which may be left on during the nights due to their low noise output) this may become a concern.

Anyway, no signs of upcoming failure with my GPs so far. Unload noise has remained the same as well despite high mileage.

tawd1992
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Post by tawd1992 » Wed Oct 15, 2008 1:57 pm

I ended up getting the WD10EACS drive. The parking noise isn't bad at all & overall I'm pretty happy with the drive. As whiic said the parking noise is similar to the seek noise of the drive.

One thing I noticed is that this drive vibrates much less than my HD501LJ. The seek noise is similar between the two. Sometimes the seek noise on my WD10EACS is practically inaudible from a few feet away & other times it is noticable but still very quiet. If I'm defragging the drive or scanning for viruses the seeks are louder, but if I'm watching a recorded tv show or recording a tv show I can't really hear the drive.

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:22 pm

I recommend enabling AAM on the drive if slower seek times isn't a problem (normally theses drives are used primarily for storage anyway). Decreases seek noise quite a bit.

tawd1992
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Post by tawd1992 » Thu Oct 16, 2008 6:57 am

I was hoping that AAM was disabled when I got the drive, but unfortunately it was already enabled so I couldn't make it any quieter. :(

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Thu Oct 16, 2008 8:26 pm

Strange. Are you sure? I have four of them and none had AAM enabled by default. I use Hitachi Feature Tool to set AAM btw, it's included on the Ultimate Boot CD.

tawd1992
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Post by tawd1992 » Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:06 pm

Yes, I used the Hitachi Feature Tool from the ubcd also & the drive already had aam enabled at the quietest position. I switched aam off to see the difference & it was noticeably louder.

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Mon Oct 20, 2008 6:14 am

I just bought another WD GP yesterday and it was the new type with three platters (yay! :)) and it also had AAM enabled by default.

Matija
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Post by Matija » Mon Oct 20, 2008 6:17 am

So, uhm, can this parking thing be turned off, or must the drives be skipped by anyone taking them seriously?

florinp3
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Post by florinp3 » Thu Oct 23, 2008 12:38 am

Vicotnik wrote:I just bought another WD GP yesterday and it was the new type with three platters (yay! :)) and it also had AAM enabled by default.
Interesting, mine is a 3 platter too, but came with AAM on loud (as shown by Notebook Hardware Control). Much better after lowering tunning it down.

bexx
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Post by bexx » Fri Oct 24, 2008 2:15 pm

For anyone concerned about head parking there is utility here to change idle time before park or disable it compeltely:
http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p ... opic=27269


On my new new 1TB GP drives, 371 on hours, 5 parks on both drives. On older drive 6340 hours and 214099 parks lol. The new ones are rarely parking,... acutally on new ones load cycle is exactly same as power cycle... wondering if they count opwering system off as a park in which case that is the ONLY time the new drives have ever parked.

The old drive is doing 33 parks per hour or about ever 30 seconds. Should probably turn off parks as it'll be hitting that 300k limit pretty soon :/.

JazzJackRabbit
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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:02 am

Good find bexx.

RedAE102
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Post by RedAE102 » Tue Nov 04, 2008 12:14 pm

My technical knowledge in some respects is quite limited... I am trying to run this program, but since I run 64-bit Vista on the machine where the GreenPower lives (as a secondary storage drive), the 16-bit program doesn't run. So I plugged in my old IDE drive which still has 32-bit XP Pro and switched the SATA mode back to IDE from AHCI and tried again, where the program said it found no compatible drives. Do I need to run it directly from a DOS CD (I have no floppy drives left)? Does it need to be run from an OS on an SATA hard drive?

Any advice/help anyone could give me would be *greatly* appreciated, because at its current rate, my WD10EACS will exceed its load/unload spec before it hits 2 years old. (!) Thanks in advance!

AnaLogiC
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Post by AnaLogiC » Tue Nov 04, 2008 2:00 pm

Do I need to run it directly from a DOS CD (I have no floppy drives left)?
Yes, and your controller must be in IDE-Mode, AHCI didn't work at least for me.
I've no floppy-drive either, I downloaded the ultimate boot-CD (UBCD) and injected the wdidle3.exe using UltraISO in the dosapps-subdirectory - burn to disk, boot FreeDOS from the menu, running wdidle3 without parameters should list you drives and the current idle-timer settings then.

Curiously I found that disabling the timer on my two WD6400AACS didn't work as expected - I could see on the power-meter that there no longer was any reduction, still I got the parking-click (which is just slightly louder than a normal seek) and the pause (~300ms) on unparking.
Especially noticeable when you use a 200ms-buffer in Winamp and do nothing else.

I now have set the timer to its maximum (25.5s), surprisingly it still kicks in sometimes (so XP doesn't write to the disk as often as I thought) - I increased the Winamp-buffer to 1000ms and decided to live with the rare pauses.[/quote]

RedAE102
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Post by RedAE102 » Tue Nov 04, 2008 4:20 pm

AnaLogiC wrote: Yes, and your controller must be in IDE-Mode, AHCI didn't work at least for me.
I've no floppy-drive either, I downloaded the ultimate boot-CD (UBCD) and injected the wdidle3.exe using UltraISO in the dosapps-subdirectory - burn to disk, boot FreeDOS from the menu, running wdidle3 without parameters should list you drives and the current idle-timer settings then.
Did just that, and it worked like a charm. Thank you so much! Bumped the timer up to the maximum 25.5s on my WD10EACS and my WD6400AAKS. Doing so on the 640 Blue doesn't really do anything, but the timer was active at 800ms just like it was on the GP, so I figured I might as well.

Anyway, thanks again!

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