Strange issue with my HDD not responding for short periods

[Abakan]

Here is a screen grab from Event Viewer. http://i.imgur.com/qzsjy2F.jpg

 

This is a WD10EZEX, regular WD Blue 1TB drive, it's a year old. First, I ran the WD diagnostic test on it, it passed. It hasn't been overheated, though this rig is left on 24/7, but it doesn't do much work, web browsing and gaming. This issue has creeped up little by little, it's now a regular occurrence. Regardless of what task I'm doing, opening Chrome, playing a game, occasionally the drive just stops responding, the HDD light indicator stays lit, no blinking of any sort, like what would be typical, this lasts anywhere from 5 or so seconds, and very rarely a full minute or so. I don't think it's related to power savings, it can happen at any time no matter what I'm doing. I'm building X99 in about September or so, so I've just dealt with it hoping it would last, until now I felt certain it would. But this morning already it's done this 3 times, it's worrying me. I'm on an extremely tight budget until September. I can say with almost complete certainty it's not malware, or a virus, or anything like that. Any suggestions? The machine has never even blue screened, most reliable rig I've ever owned.

 

If for whatever reason more specs are needed, it's Haswell i5 4440/ 16GB/ GTX 770/ Win 8.1 x64, very basic setup meant to get me through until my new build in a few months. No SSD, extremely generic storage for now, just this single HDD.

[TheMcSame]

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you (and neither do other people by the looks of it). I've had a similar problem with another drive and I didn't know what to blame, the drive still does it today actually and it has basically nothing on it and has no other purpose than a small backup for my music and a few other things.

 

There's the old switch the cables port trick to see if they're a problem but from my experience it didn't do a thing. Booting into safe mode is an option just to make sure it isn't a piece of software. I'd contact WD support and see what they can tell you unless @Captain_WD knows what's causing it. 

 

For now I'd backup the data just in case.

[Abakan]

I think about the only thing I can add, it does at times seem to happen soon after resuming from sitting idle. I'm going to set the power profile to never turn off the HDD, for a week or so, see what happens. I prefer not to do this since I leave this thing on 24/7, but this may be a useful way to narrow it down, only now thought of it.

 

Backed up my critical data, thankfully there's not much, just docs and music. Yeah, I'm really at a loss myself. I've owned countless HDD's over the years, I've seen them die in all manner of ways, but I've never seen this. If it gets any worse, a format/reinstall will be in order; I'm trying to make it until win10 drops, it's an excuse to do all of this. 

 

For now I'm going to contact WD, I've owned a lot of their products, maybe I can sweet talk them into sending me a drive.

 

Edit: I swapped out the SATA cable for a new one, and changed it to a different port, so far this seems like the most likely issue. Wouldn't surprise me, I've never seen this behavior from a HDD before, certainly not on one that passes all the critical tests.

 

2nd Edit: Just happened again, Chrome stalled for a few seconds, HDD indicator light up solid, and it threw the same warning in Event Viewer, plus a new one> http://i.imgur.com/7Upv8q0.jpg

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey Abakan,

 

Try plugging the drive to other SATA ports with the new cable and see if the problem persists.

Did you run both tests of the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic or just the quick test? I would open the CMD and run chkdsk /r and check for bad sectors. Updating the BIOS, OS and all the drivers to the latest available versions might also fix the problem.

 

Captain_WD.

[Abakan]

Thanks for the reply. I ran both tests, both passed. Tried several brand new SATA cables and I tried every port, no change. I'm going to update the BIOS today, there's a new version, but man I hate doing it, bricked a few over the years with no explanation. OS is up to date, drivers as well. It has been an intermittent issue that started I guess a few months ago, but yesterday was insane, like 5 times, whereas before it would happen once or twice a week at most. Last night and today it's been fine. These are exactly the type of issues that make me pull my hair out. Google searches turn up tons and tons of results of people with similar if not identical problems. Many of them seemed to be solved by disabling PCI-E link power management, though I've had it disabled all along. I'm sort of suspicious though, this option doesn't seem to have any effect at all, my link when the system is idle absolutely lowers to 1.1 @16X. Some seem to benefit from running on High Performance, I'm gonna try that as well, but one thing at a time.

 

It was an OEM drive, so WD isn't interested in replacing it, but they don't mind giving me tech support, which was to run the tool Acer wants me to ship the entire PC back to them, but there's hardly anything Acer left of it, I've replaced almost everything, and I don't trust them not to steal my parts. Interesting that when I contacted their support, they almost immediately wanted me to send it in, not a good sign, it must be some sort of obvious issue, eh, I really hope not. 

 

Again thanks for the reply, if I manage to solve it, or if it just dies, I'll report back.

[Juan Remes]

I have a friend with this exact same drive with this exact same issue, sometimes his PC just freezes and the HDD led stays lit like a complete minute if not freezes completely and has to hard reset the machine, he still has this problem.

 

I remember to have watched a linus video where he reviewed this exact HDD and said something about updating the firmware because if not it would have problems, IDK is just a tought

[Abakan]

I'm now stuck in an infinite loop of chkdsk, no idea where to go from here, probably will format/reinstall. Thanks again for the replies. I think probably data got corrupted somewhere during one of our frequent power outages. I need a UPS unit asap, because here in suburban America, we haven't made the discovery that there is no wind or lightning below ground, so we hang out power lines right through trees that don't get trimmed

 

Anyway I'm gonna have to invest in a good UPS either way, we're gonna build a NAS here at home for me and the wife, we'll need legit backup power.

[linuxfan66]

That hdd probably shouldn't be used...

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

If you can, try the drive on another system and see if the problem persists. If the tool reports the drive as health it should be safe to use. I'd also check the PSU for problems as it might be damaged from those power outages. you can look up ways to do that on the internet or here in the Cases and Power Supplies section.

 

Post back with the results of the tests.

 

Captain_WD.

[Abakan]

I haven't tested the Psu yet, but I'll try that. I have no idea what the PC was doing yesterday, but I came back to it 3 hours later and it was booted up to my login screen. I had just let it go, walked out of the room in frustrating and just left it to whatever it was doing.. anyway I read the log, no issues at all and no bad sectors. Now it seems normal, I've only had a few hours of use with it, but the HDD is behaving normally, which isn't saying much yet. Before yesterday it wasn't an everyday occurrence, no idea why it bugged out so much. I'm gonna run it hard today, see how it does. Also I'm gonna look into the Psu, though I should add I did swap out which port on the Psu I was using. I had 4 available all together, changed it twice, so I'm not on the third out of four options.

 

Will report back what if anything I find.

[Captain_WD]

I haven't tested the Psu yet, but I'll try that. I have no idea what the PC was doing yesterday, but I came back to it 3 hours later and it was booted up to my login screen. I had just let it go, walked out of the room in frustrating and just left it to whatever it was doing.. anyway I read the log, no issues at all and no bad sectors. Now it seems normal, I've only had a few hours of use with it, but the HDD is behaving normally, which isn't saying much yet. Before yesterday it wasn't an everyday occurrence, no idea why it bugged out so much. I'm gonna run it hard today, see how it does. Also I'm gonna look into the Psu, though I should add I did swap out which port on the Psu I was using. I had 4 available all together, changed it twice, so I'm not on the third out of four options.

 

Will report back what if anything I find.

 

Do you have any crashes yet? Maybe there were bad sectors and they were isolated and your computer will run normally for the time being.

 

Captain_WD.

[Abakan]

Day two now with no issues, I want to believe it was bad sectors, and repaired, but both the WD tool and Chkdsk reported everything fine. Though, it did run more than once and overwrote the log, it's possible on the first run it found something, it had to reboot several times, which I found bizarre, I've never seen that behavior before, maybe it's new for Windows 8.

 

So, I've tested the HDD just about every way imaginable and ran it awfully hard doing random unnecessary things to test it, so far so good. If I make it through this week I'll be confident it's at least temporarily good to go, in the past every time I've had a drive develop bad sectors, it was only a matter of time before it died. Though I think I've just been especially unlucky with regard to that.

 

I really really wish I wouldn't have cheaped out last year when I built it, and just bought a cheap SSD to boot from, I had the money but told myself it was unnecessary. Come September I'm gonna grab whatever is the most reliable SSD on the market in 1TB and not look back. As for the NAS, I guess I'll spend extra for server grade HDD's, too much bad luck with consumer drives over the last 5 years.

[Captain_WD]

Day two now with no issues, I want to believe it was bad sectors, and repaired, but both the WD tool and Chkdsk reported everything fine. Though, it did run more than once and overwrote the log, it's possible on the first run it found something, it had to reboot several times, which I found bizarre, I've never seen that behavior before, maybe it's new for Windows 8.

 

So, I've tested the HDD just about every way imaginable and ran it awfully hard doing random unnecessary things to test it, so far so good. If I make it through this week I'll be confident it's at least temporarily good to go, in the past every time I've had a drive develop bad sectors, it was only a matter of time before it died. Though I think I've just been especially unlucky with regard to that.

 

I really really wish I wouldn't have cheaped out last year when I built it, and just bought a cheap SSD to boot from, I had the money but told myself it was unnecessary. Come September I'm gonna grab whatever is the most reliable SSD on the market in 1TB and not look back. As for the NAS, I guess I'll spend extra for server grade HDD's, too much bad luck with consumer drives over the last 5 years.

 

I'm sorry to hear about the bad luck with the drives. I hope with the new builds you will have better luck and less problems.

To be honest, if these were physical bad sectors, the chkdsk /r most probably isoalted them and they are currently invisible to the OS. Sadly, physical bad sectors cannot be fixed as these are physical scratches on the drive platter. Such scratches form miniature air pockets on that spot and whenever the read/write head hovers over that place, due to the high speed, air pressure and the very small distance from the platter itself, it falls a bit in that pocket, then rises again and from the up/down movement it has a high chance of landing somewhere else on the platter before returning to it's stable and normal stance. We are talking about very small distances but with the little distance from the platter and the high rotational speed, this happens and thus new bad sectors are formed. This way if a drive starts to get bad sectors it's prone to failure sooner or later and it's always advisable to be replaced.

 

Hope this is useful,

 

Captain_WD.

[Abakan]

Thanks for the kind reply. So far it's still running good, hopefully no new bad sectors will arise, or at least not too soon. I just need a few more months. If I didn't have such huge bills and obligations at the moment I'd grab a cheap SSD, but wow my budget is tight; though it's my own fault. I went overboard with some other things, things I care less about than tech, i r dumb in that sense. Anyway fingers crossed, and thanks for all the useful info. It's greatly appreciated.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

You are most welcome The longer the drive spins with the old bad sectors, the bigger the chance of getting new ones so I'd try to limit the spinning time. And do keep backups of the important data.  

 

Captain_WD.