While watching a movie my HDD falls asleep

[leclod]

I don't know what's happening. I'm using VLC.

I watch a movie, suddenly the screen freezes and I get the same same noises like when the HDD is waking up. This happens often.

Otherwise the drive seems mostly fine, I can transfer those movie files with no issue (but I've had the transfer freezing too).

 

Does this ring a bell ?

 

When I test the hdd, the tests return successful

[TukangUsapEmenq]

I suppose it's time to change your HDD I guess, better safe than sorry if you got important data inside it. How old is that thing?

[leclod]

12 minutes ago, TukangUsapEmenq said:

I suppose it's time to change your HDD I guess, better safe than sorry if you got important data inside it. How old is that thing?

Maybe, it's a barely 2 year old seagate 16tb

I just disconnected it and my pc is quiet as a whisper. Before there was a slow pulsating vibration

[TukangUsapEmenq]

3 minutes ago, leclod said:

Maybe, it's a barely 2 year old seagate 16tb

I just disconnected it and my pc is quiet as a whisper. Before there was a slow pulsating vibration

Yup, definitely time to change as it's possible your HDD is damaged physically. Ain't much of you can do unfortunately than to backup your data (star from the most important first) and change it.

 

I had 2 laptops, and I did use 3 HDDs. All of them died after 2-3 years of (daily) use, and I lost a lot of important data. Nearly fully switched to a SSD (two years and still running strong, while I did use HDD the performance starts to deteriorate after that 2 years, idk why) afterwards for my main drive, and external drive for archival storage.

[Needfuldoer]

Check the drive with CrystalDiskInfo before jumping to conclusions about its health.

[leclod]

24 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Check the drive with CrystalDiskInfo before jumping to conclusions about its health.

See anything suspicious ?

 

I reconnected the drive while swapping position in my mATX case with another hdd (I use 3). No excessive noise for now.

No sleeping while watching the movie for now.

 

Could it be Windows doing some maintenance work in the background ?

 

[LWM723]

Your drive is fine, it's just going to sleep or parking the heads. Disable that in power settings or disable APM with CrystalDiskInfo.

[mariushm]

Nothing wrong with your drive. 

Probably the video player forgets to tell the operating system to not turn of the drives when the system is idle (you don't type or move mouse for a period of time). 

 

Go in control panel > power management at the power profile and customize it so that the drives don't turn off after n minutes of inactivity 

 

all control panel items > power options > edit plan settings > change advanced power settings > 

and either enter 0 or some big value like 30m or 1h at Turn off hard disk after 

 

[leclod]

How can a drive shut down while I'm using it to watch a movie (or transfer a file) ? (then wake up and shut down again)

[zulc22]

11 minutes ago, leclod said:

How can a drive shut down while I'm using it to watch a movie (or transfer a file) ? (then wake up and shut down again)

well, i'd assume Windows is doing it and it's the Windows power options, because that sounds like it happens when your keyboard and mouse are idle, which is how Windows would usually measure 'inactivity'. the drive itself's power saving options should probably not be turned off for now because those would be based on I/O inactivity and NOT user inactivity.

[mariushm]

An example - not saying it's like this in your case but it could be : 

 

The video player buffers 100-200 MB out of your 4 GB movie ... that's maybe a couple of minutes... Windows notices that your video player read 100-200 MB sequentially from the video file and attempts to cache the remainder of the file in RAM in the unused ram of your computer, and copies 500 MB - 1 GB, maybe more, whatever it feels like right after your video player finished loading those 100-200 MB.  When the player is done with those 100-200 MB, the player tries to access the drive and instead the operating system intervenes and says no need, already read the data for you, and it gets the cached data from the ram, a chunk of that 500MB - 1 GB. And repeat until those 500 MB - 1 GB are served to VLC.

The drive is sitting unused for maybe 10m or more,  because player keeps getting data from ram,  Windows may see nobody touches keyboard or mouse, so assumes system is idle and turns off the drive. 

Eventually the cached amount of given to VLC and now when VLC tries to read more data, there's no more data in ram so the operating system tries to fall back to hard drive and the drive is now turned off

[leclod]

Thank you guys,

 

But there must be something else.

My 4GB movie is in fact a 60GB 4K movie (my biggest one, to check the system) and the movie could freeze twice in 5mn while the drive not even being fragmented at all.

 

Everything seems fine for now. Fingers crossed.

 

(I updated the hdd firmware yesterday, something was off for a while)