Drive keeps being busy after SR is finished

[humke]

When I did a level 5 on a drive a while ago I noticed something that I did not expect. When the level 5 was finally finished after 50+ hours or so, the drive kept making sounds like it was very busy writing or reading data (seek sounds). Even after exiting SR and returning tot the FreeDOS prompt, the drive kept making these "I am very busy" sounds. As far as I can tell this must have been initiated by the drive itself, as no other process from outside of the drive was communicating with it. I booted SR with a bootable USB on a ZimaBoard with the drive attached to one of the SATA ports. The drive was a WD20EARX. Is it normal behavior for a drive to be this busy on it's own?

With another drive I did not notice this behavior after the scan was finished.

Regards,
Arjan

 

[ShadowMeow]

Does it stop if you wait for 10 minutes?

 

[humke]

I don't know because I did not wait that long but it sure was doing this for a couple of minutes before I powered down the ZimaBoard. Then, it immediately started to show expected behavior . I figured it would be safe to power down, as no external process was communicating with the drive. SR was finished and exited.

 

[ShadowMeow]

What happens if you let the drive idle for just over 30 seconds? Does it do seeks then?

 

[humke]

I just tried connecting the drive to the ZimaBoard again. It was on a shelf since experiencing the behavior described in my post. It keeps doing "stuff" as soon as it's powered on. It has been doing it for almost 15 minutes now. After approximately 11 minutes I decided to disconnect the SATA connector, leaving only the power connector connected. No change in behavior. Could it be doing a S.M.A.R.T. test on it's own? It's doing something on it's own...

I made a video recording of it, so there's proof if needed.

EDIT: ZimaBoard now has an uptime of a littble bit over 1 hour and the drive is still making all the "activity" sounds.
EDIT2: Somewhere between 1 and 2.5 hours of uptime of the ZimaBoard, the drive became silent (but still spinning).

 

[ShadowMeow]

I know drives do self testing after idling for a bit, but I'm not sure why it's doin stuff as soon as it's powered on.

Can you share the video?

 

[humke]

I know drives do self testing after idling for a bit, but I'm not sure why it's doin stuff as soon as it's powered on.

Can you share the video?

Did some conversion, as the original was almost 6GB. Here's the video via a WeTransfer link (83310 KB):
https://we.tl/t-n7xYoDG2vL

Since the video isn't that interesting to look at, I also created an audio-only version of the video file which is obviously smaller (11299 KB).
https://we.tl/t-KzJ1fZEuxn

It's not a perfect recording, so you will need some volume to be able to hear the drive sounds.
At approximately 11:20 you can see me removing the SATA data cable and the drive keeps being busy.

As I mentioned as an edit in my previous post, somewhere between 1 and 2.5 hours the harddisk became silent (while still spinning). So somewhere in that timeframe it apparently finished whatever it was doing. So now I am curious what the drive will do after another SR scan.

EDIT: the links will only be available for 7 days

 

[PHolder]

I'd guess the drive is SMR, but that model number is not supposed to be as near as I can tell. There is no reason for a CMR drive to ever do any "idle" maintenance, whereas a SMR drive may have to move things around. One thing I could expect is the drive may use a portion of the drive as CMR and eventually move the data into the SMR section.

 

[ShadowMeow]

The WD20EARX looks like it's CMR. If it was made before 2018 it's CMR.

 

[humke]

It's from 2013 according to the label. After the drive was silent, I powered down the ZimaBoard (and therefor the drive). After powering on a few moments later the drive stayed silent (only the "light" spinning sound). So it looks like it finished whatever it needed to do and it remembers that. And, when I powered on the drive for the first time since a while today, it looks like it continued to do what it was doing after the level 5 scan from a few weeks ago. As mentioned before, I didn't wait for the drive to become silent at that time when I powered it down. So it looks like it remembered it had to finish some work. Whatever this work actually is.

It's undergoing a level 3 now.

 

[humke]

So, I didn't plan the level 3 scan very well as I wouldn't be there when it finished to check the drive's behavior. Therefor I decided to stop the scan at about 90% complete. The drive showed the exact same behavior as before. Immediately after stopping the scan and exiting SpinRite the drive became very busy. So it looks like it just does this after having done a serious workout? Why and what it is doing is still a mystery to me.

 

[SeanBZA]

Probably an early SMR drive, still busy doing the rewriting of the data to compact space on the drive.

 

[humke]

Ok, so I understand that for SMR this would be expected?

Tried to look up information about this drive being CMR or SMR, but couldn't find any hard proof online. According to https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/ the drive is CMR, however it seems anyone can add drive information here so this could be not true.

 

[Steve]

@humke : Given that the drive is dated 2013, I suspect it may be before the mess that SMR has created.

SMR, as you likely know if you've been googling, stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording. And it's like shingles on the roof where one layer overlaps the next. This was done to cramp even more tracks into the same space as before... but it means that rewriting data on an "underneath" track requires propagating that rewrite up through the overlaying tracks. It's truly the definition of a “kludge”, and this is why SMR drives are “recommended” for archival storage which is mostly read and infrequently written.

Unfortunately, many manufacturers have been found to be “cheating” since no one wants to use this drives. So manufacturers have been hiding that technology inside their drives.

In any event, I'm aware of the drive you have. I have several because they WERE doing weird things as reported by others during SpinRite's testing. But mostly when the drives' data was in bad shape. SpinRite works well with them generally, though there's no telling what exactly is happening with your specific drive. Unfortunately, drive makers want to hide what's going on as well as they can.

There aren't many good answers to your good questions, I'm afraid.

 

[humke]

There aren't many good answers to your good questions, I'm afraid.

But knowing THAT is sort of comforting as I don't have to search for answers that can't be found, so thank you for stating this. Apart from this behavior that I noticed, the drive is just working fine for me which is the most important aspect of it.