Hard Drive Oddity

Brizzle · Jul 31, 2023

Howdy folks,

My desktop PC has4 internal drives. One of them (a 3" Samsung 2TB HDD) is giving me cause for concern as it often takes a few seconds to respond when I open it, or open a folder on it. Also, it has an odd icon when I look in Windows Explorer - see image below.

Does anyone know why the icon would look like this or why I might be experiencing slow responses?

The PC has an Intel Core i5-8400 CPU (not overclocked), 32GB RAM, RTX3060 GPU and is running W11 x64, 22H2 (build 22621.1702). The MoBo is an ASUS Prime Z370-P with BIOS from 2021 and is running perfectly except for this little issue.

Thanks in advance :)

FreeBooter · Jul 31, 2023

Use CrystalDiskInfo to check SMART health report of the hard disk drive (HDD).

Brizzle · Jul 31, 2023

Hi Freebooter, thanks for the reply.
Hmm, appears there are some faults with the drive ... but I have no idea what any of this means :)

Porthos · Jul 31, 2023

Brizzle said:
Hmm, appears there are some faults with the drive ... but I have no idea what any of this means :)

It means backing up the data to another drive and replacing it.
The Seagate DM series drives were/are flaky.

Brizzle · Jul 31, 2023

Porthos said:
It means backing up the data to another drive and replacing it.
The Seagate DM series drives were/are flaky.

Oh well, that's what I was expecting to be the answer

How unreliable are these DM drives? Only I've got another one in the PC (E: in the screen grab above) but that is showing as being okay ... at the moment.

Porthos · Jul 31, 2023

Brizzle said:
How unreliable are these DM drives? Only I've got another one in the PC (E: in the screen grab above) but that is showing as being okay ... at the moment.

Older blog but...

What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

My last two blog posts were about expected drive lifetimes and drive reliability. These posts were an outgrowth of the careful work that we've done at Backblaze to find the most cost-effective disk drives. Running a truly unlimited online backup service for only $5 per month means our cloud...

www.backblaze.com

Also

2TB harddisk failing

My Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001 is failing, I did chkdsk /r yesterday and that took 4 hours to fix. The harddisk is still bootable and currently backing up the file but the transfer rate is terrible as you can see below. The transfer jumps from few MB/s to zero. I'm running Seatools and it failed...

www.techpowerup.com

FreeBooter · Jul 31, 2023

Western Digital has been known for having the most reliable hard drives, while Seagate offers a wider range of features and storage capacities. Ultimately, it will come down to what you need in terms of storage size, speed, and performance.

Brizzle · Jul 31, 2023

FreeBooter said:
Western Digital has been known for having the most reliable hard drives, while Seagate offers a wider range of features and storage capacities. Ultimately, it will come down to what you need in terms of storage size, speed, and performance.

Oddly, the only hard drives I have ever had fail (until now) have been WD. Having said that, I have just ordered a 4TB WD Blue WD40EZAZ from Amazon which should be here on Wednesday.

The drive is only used to store original (i.e. unedited) camera files so is only accessed when I download images from a memory card. I also have the files saved to my Synology NAS (and other places) so if this drive dies tonight it won't be the end of the world.

Brizzle · Jul 31, 2023

Thanks to Freebooter and Porthos for their invaluable assistance :)

Porthos · Jul 31, 2023

Brizzle said:
I have just ordered a 4TB WD Blue WD40EZAZ from Amazon which should be here on Wednesday.

I only do WD Black because of the 5yr warranty. I have replaced many blues and greens over the years for clients.
No drive lasts forever and should have backups at regular intervals.

My second drive is a Black.

johnlgalt · Jul 31, 2023

I was a Seagate man myself, but I stuck to Barracudas for spinners. Only Barracuda of mine that died were the pair of 500 GB 7200.11s that were fried by a lightning strike. After a board replacement and firmware flash, they were good to go again.

Meanwhile, I have plenty of WDs (yes, Blues and Greens lol) desktop drives and WD laptop drives that have died, as well as dead Hitachi (?) laptop 2.5s lying around.

To each their own. I have friends who swear by WD, but my first experiences with HDDs was with Conner Peripheral drives, and those things were rock solid (and persnickety - had a Conner 850 MB that refused to allow any other HDD except a Conner 425 on the same IDE cable). Since Seagate eventually acquired them, I stuck with Seagate.

Brizzle · Aug 1, 2023

As a consumer my hard drives don't get the same degree of use that an enterprise would give them. The PC lays idle for several days at a time until I have a batch of photographs to edit and that normally takes just a couple of hours. I have a laptop for day-to-day computing needs.

In the past I have had two WD external drives that failed after about 2 years so when I spec'd my NAS I went with Seagate Iron Wolf drives. Those have been powered on 24/7 for the past three years apart from when I have dismantled the NAS to clean it. It's amazing how much dust it collects :)

johnlgalt · Aug 1, 2023

Yeah, my systems get a yearly spring cleaning as well. Filters only go so far....

hdmi · Aug 2, 2023

Porthos said:
Older blog but...

What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

My last two blog posts were about expected drive lifetimes and drive reliability. These posts were an outgrowth of the careful work that we've done at Backblaze to find the most cost-effective disk drives. Running a truly unlimited online backup service for only $5 per month means our cloud...

www.backblaze.com

Also

2TB harddisk failing

My Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001 is failing, I did chkdsk /r yesterday and that took 4 hours to fix. The harddisk is still bootable and currently backing up the file but the transfer rate is terrible as you can see below. The transfer jumps from few MB/s to zero. I'm running Seatools and it failed...

www.techpowerup.com

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

Examine hard drive life expectancy with Kaplan-Meier curves and discover how long your drives and SSDs are likely to last.

www.backblaze.com

So, knowing that the Seagate ST14000NM001G only costs $175 on amazon versus a whopping $228.73 for the WDC WUH721414ALE6L4, and knowing that the life expectancy of the WDC also took a serious deep dive after only 22 months of starting to use it, would you bet your own life on that the WDC is worth all that extra money?
More here:

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022

Backblaze wants to be as transparent as possible with our customers about our business. Here’s what you need to know about our drives in Q1 2022.

www.backblaze.com

Here comes my only conclusion. You're better off spending your extra money on extra backup storage space. Because, buying into the old fad of WD being always so much "better" than Seagate is only going to hurt your bank account. Like, much more heavily than many think.

Further reading:

How Long Do Disk Drives Last?

We followed up on our initial drive life study in 2013 with data from over 200,000 disk drives. Read this post to see the latest from our reporting on the life expectancy of the drives in our data centers.

www.backblaze.com

johnlgalt · Aug 2, 2023

I have been relying on BackBlaze stats as well, and while the OP (and others) have noted, we consumers rarely ever put our drives through what an Enterprise-level SAN does, so there is that to consider. Additionally, BackBlaze also makes use of drives that are designed for use in Enterprise, both size and stability, versus consumer drives, yet another consideration to acknowledge and understand.

In the end, it's subjective. Some people would rather buy a Lamborghini instead of 2 Jaguars (with one as a backup).

Personally, I'm sworn off spinners, and I don't really think that either WD or Seagate can ever match other SSD manufacturers in terms of reliability, functionality, and of course speed. So, this is really just a talking point for me now, but to each their own - it's already known that too many don't invest in backup policies and / or architecture as it is, so that is always going to be a good suggestion.

hdmi · Aug 3, 2023

johnlgalt said:
I have been relying on BackBlaze stats as well, and while the OP (and others) have noted, we consumers rarely ever put our drives through what an Enterprise-level SAN does, so there is that to consider. Additionally, BackBlaze also makes use of drives that are designed for use in Enterprise, both size and stability, versus consumer drives, yet another consideration to acknowledge and understand.

In the end, it's subjective. Some people would rather buy a Lamborghini instead of 2 Jaguars (with one as a backup).

Personally, I'm sworn off spinners, and I don't really think that either WD or Seagate can ever match other SSD manufacturers in terms of reliability, functionality, and of course speed. So, this is really just a talking point for me now, but to each their own - it's already known that too many don't invest in backup policies and / or architecture as it is, so that is always going to be a good suggestion.

Backblaze also had an older article (that I can't find right now) showing that there was no correlation whatsoever between drive failure rates and the intensity of the workload, but this was at a time when the drives were still all CMR, and drive capacities were still rather limited also in addition to this. With the gradual introduction of SMR and methods that have dramatically increased drive capacity beyond just a good handful of Terabytes, it seems that a correlation between life expectancy and workload intensity no longer is absent. Or at least it isn't always.

Green, or eco-friendly drives are designed to automatically spin down after a certain idle period regardless of whether you disable the automatic spindown in the power plan of Windows so it is a separate timer that is part of the Power Management (hardware capability) of the actual drive itself. Such drives have a more restrictive limit on how many hours they can be kept spinning before they can be considered to have entered their end-of-life phase. They are generally more budget-friendly (and typically perform slower) compared to "standard" 3.5 inch 7200rpm consumer models, and their automatic spindown behavior can help to save on power (and the electric bill).

However, there also is a limit on the number of times that a drive can spin up, and this is regardless of whether the drive is green or is designed to be kept spinning 24/7 (in a NAS or etc.) so, excessively frequent automatic spindows may shorten a drive's lifespan. But then, I found a way to prevent Windows from randomly spinning them up again after putting the drives to sleep. That is, spinning them up for no apparent reason other than the fact that it is Windows. Especially the constant buzzing noise a drive makes when it's spinning while it shouldn't be spinning is why a lot of people (myself included) have been looking for a way to fix this problem that is caused by Windows, and Microsoft still refuses to fix it (after 8 whole years I mean... sometimes it really does look like all they ever do is tell a person to go to the Feedback Hub and that's it, see ya next time...). You just got to know how to use your duct tape on Windows is all.

That said, the last 3.5 inch drive I bought was my 8TB Seagate ST8000DM002 (old model), which is a CMR drive and has shown really great endurance according to Backblaze also. I paid 245 Euros for it (new), from amazon Germany ~7 years ago when a comparable drive from Western Digital was still fairly close to 300 Euros so, this was yet another one of those classical-old "thanks but no thanks to Western Digital" moments. It's only money of course, but... lol

AFAIK the only "DM" model from Seagate that had an abnormally high failure rate was the ST3000DM001. I got three of these back in the day, and, only one of them has died. All my other 3.5 inch drives are even older still, in the 1TB - 2TB range. I never bought any SMR drives. I own lots of media files.

johnlgalt · Aug 3, 2023

hdmi said:
However, there also is a limit on the number of times that a drive can spin up, and this is regardless of whether the drive is green or is designed to be kept spinning 24/7 (in a NAS or etc.) so, excessively frequent automatic spindows may shorten a drive's lifespan. But then, I found a way to prevent Windows from randomly spinning them up again after putting the drives to sleep. That is, spinning them up for no apparent reason other than the fact that it is Windows. Especially the constant buzzing noise a drive makes when it's spinning while it shouldn't be spinning is why a lot of people (myself included) have been looking for a way to fix this problem that is caused by Windows, and Microsoft still refuses to fix it (after 8 whole years I mean... sometimes it really does look like all they ever do is tell a person to go to the Feedback Hub and that's it, see ya next time...). You just got to know how to use your duct tape on Windows is all.

And this is with Windows Indexing completely disabled? Because it loves running indexing services when idle. Even if a drive is spun down.

But, yeah, with spinners, I was the exact opposite - I bought good drives that were not green, and let them spin all the time (disabling Windows time outs everywhere I could for the HDDs). Now, with SSDs, I really don't care - the difference in wake and access time is so marginally different, there might as well not be a difference.

But, yeah, when I was still using spinners, I was a Seagate guy. And, again, mainly because they absorbed Conner.

hdmi · Aug 5, 2023

johnlgalt said:
And this is with Windows Indexing completely disabled? Because it loves running indexing services when idle. Even if a drive is spun down.

But, yeah, with spinners, I was the exact opposite - I bought good drives that were not green, and let them spin all the time (disabling Windows time outs everywhere I could for the HDDs). Now, with SSDs, I really don't care - the difference in wake and access time is so marginally different, there might as well not be a difference.

But, yeah, when I was still using spinners, I was a Seagate guy. And, again, mainly because they absorbed Conner.

Yeah, you can completely disable everything that you might suspect would be the culprit in Windows 10/11 and be able to reduce the frequency at which the issue occurs to only a few times per day. But you'll still see the ntoskrnl.exe (aka the "System" Windows process) spin it up to verify that the drive is still present and valid so its hardware can be enumerated. Trying to find out what handle could be responsible for this inadvertent disk activity with Sysinternals' Process Explorer turns up nothing. It's just some low level driver stuff that the Windows kernel insists on doing, but the 'trick' that I use to prevent it (and that should work for─if their Power Management has an idle timer─all SATA/eSATA HDDs and any USB external HDD with the type of USB-to-SATA adapter that exposes this Power Management setting) involves running HDDScan for Windows with command line parameters within a set of batchfiles (beforeSleep.bat and afterSleep.bat) as part of revoSleep. In revoSleep, if 'Sleep' is unticked (while both 'Offline' and 'Deactivate' are still ticked) for the drive in question, then the aforementioned 2 batchfiles are responsible for handling the actual spindown action/behavior of the drive with revoSleep. Whereas 'Offline' and 'Deactivate' are only responsible for preventing it from spinning up again before/until you decide to spin the drive up. In beforeSleep.bat, HDDScan.exe %3 -PM 1 causes the drive to spin itself down after the smallest idle time interval expired. On my ST8000DM002, 3 seconds is the smallest interval. This buys it enough time to process the 'Offline' and 'Deactivate' before falling asleep. Setting the idle timer to 0 either causes the idle timer to be disabled or causes it to be set to the largest interval. This is hardware-specific, on my ST8000DM002 it translates to the largest interval. So, in afterSleep.bat:

Batch:

@ECHO OFF
SET c=15
:FindDrive
IF EXIST "%~1\" GOTO Mounted
TIMEOUT /T 2
SET /A c-=1
IF %c%==0 EXIT
GOTO FindDrive
:Mounted
HDDScan.exe %3 -PM 0

You can use KeepAliveHD (or similar type thing) as an added option to prevent the drive from─even after you disabled the timer in the power plan of Windows─automatically falling alseep.

Ghot · Aug 13, 2023

Porthos said:
I only do WD Black because of the 5yr warranty. I have replaced many blues and greens over the years for clients.
No drive lasts forever and should have backups at regular intervals.

My second drive is a Black.
View attachment 66380

Western Digital Blacks, for the win. In my experience, (almost 20 years using WD Blacks)... they just don't fail.
That doesn't mean they can't fail, but I've not seen one fail.

Ghot · Aug 13, 2023

hdmi said:
So, knowing that the Seagate ST14000NM001G only costs $175 on amazon versus a whopping $228.73 for the WDC WUH721414ALE6L4, and knowing that the life expectancy of the WDC also took a serious deep dive after only 22 months of starting to use it, would you bet your own life on that the WDC is worth all that extra money?

That's NOT a WD Black.
WD bought Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in 2012.

I don't know if folks remember, but back in the day... the Hitachi Deskstar was known as the Death Star hard drive due to it's ridiculous failure rate.

Now, I'm definitely NOT BackBlaze with tens of thousands of drives to test... but I've never had a WD Black fail, and I've had about eight of them over the years.

Western Digital Blacks always have model numbers like... WD2003FZEX (2TB), or WD4005FZBX (4TB)

Western Digital Blacks, aren't cheap, but you get what you pay for I guess.
Also, I think the Blacks only go up to 8TB.
For larger WD drives you're supposed to use the REDs or the GOLDs, if I recall.

WD 300GB Velociraptor (10K rpm)
M/N: WD3000HLFS-01G6U0

WD 500GB Velociraptor (10K rpm)
M/N: WD5000HHTZ-04N21V0

These Blacks are all (7200rpm)
WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0

WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0

WD 1TB Caviar Black
M/N: WD1001FALS-00J7B1

WD 2TB Black
M/N: WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0

WD 2TB Black
M/N: WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0

WD 4TB Black
M/N: WD4005FZBX-00X5WB0

WD 8TB Black
M/N: WD8001FZBX-00ASYA0

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