WD RED in Desktop PC slow to "wake up"

[Ayoralyn]

Hello everyone,

I recently took some 6TB WD RED drives I had in a failing NAS and put them in my new desktop PC, simply because the drives were fairly new and to save some money on buying new harddrives.

They've been working fine, but they're really slow to wake up whenever I want to access the data stored on them. It also happens when I start my PC, the POST is really slow. Up until now I assumed it was because they were RED drives, meaning designed for 24/7 use in a NAS, and not meant to be turned off and on all the time. Basically that they just take a while to wake up, after they haven't been accessed for a while.

It bothers me enough that I'm looking into replacing them. But I wanted to confirm my suspicions, and to make sure it's really necessary to replace them.

Is this assumption correct? And if so, is there some settings that can be changed to change this feature and make them act more like a "normal" harddrive?

Thanks in advance.

 

[motqalden]

Hello everyone,

I recently took some 6TB WD RED drives I had in a failing NAS and put them in my new desktop PC, simply because the drives were fairly new and to save some money on buying new harddrives.

They've been working fine, but they're really slow to wake up whenever I want to access the data stored on them. It also happens when I start my PC, the POST is really slow. Up until now I assumed it was because they were RED drives, meaning designed for 24/7 use in a NAS, and not meant to be turned off and on all the time. Basically that they just take a while to wake up, after they haven't been accessed for a while.

It bothers me enough that I'm looking into replacing them. But I wanted to confirm my suspicions, and to make sure it's really necessary to replace them.

Is this assumption correct? And if so, is there some settings that can be changed to change this feature and make them act more like a "normal" harddrive?

Thanks in advance.

Maybe change the power management setting for disk to power off never

 

[vegeta535]

Hello everyone,

I recently took some 6TB WD RED drives I had in a failing NAS and put them in my new desktop PC, simply because the drives were fairly new and to save some money on buying new harddrives.

They've been working fine, but they're really slow to wake up whenever I want to access the data stored on them. It also happens when I start my PC, the POST is really slow. Up until now I assumed it was because they were RED drives, meaning designed for 24/7 use in a NAS, and not meant to be turned off and on all the time. Basically that they just take a while to wake up, after they haven't been accessed for a while.

It bothers me enough that I'm looking into replacing them. But I wanted to confirm my suspicions, and to make sure it's really necessary to replace them.

Is this assumption correct? And if so, is there some settings that can be changed to change this feature and make them act more like a "normal" harddrive?

Thanks in advance.

How long is slow? I have the same issue trying to access any HDD on my PC but I am talking a few seconds. After using SSD for the past decade I could see using HDD being annoying.

 

[mwroobel]

You may be getting hit with a double whammy of both the drive spinning down as well as the SATA controller powering down as well, and having to wait for both to wake. Is the drive connected to a CPU bound controller or a PCH bound controller (or even an add-in card controller?) You should also take a look at the SMART results from the drive to make sure that there are no issues. If you have the drive and the controller set to sleep you can change the settings to have them never sleep which should alleviate the time they’re taking to wake. Power issues can also affect spin up time.

 

[Ayoralyn]

Maybe change the power management setting for disk to power off never

Thank you, I'll definitively look into that.

How long is slow? I have the same issue trying to access any HDD on my PC but I am talking a few seconds. After using SSD for the past decade I could see using HDD being annoying.

More then a few seconds. I'll say it usually takes around 10 seconds for them to wake up. It's a good point that we're used to SSD's now, but I don't think this is the issue here.

You may be getting hit with a double whammy of both the drive spinning down as well as the SATA controller powering down as well, and having to wait for both to wake. Is the drive connected to a CPU bound controller or a PCH bound controller (or even an add-in card controller?) You should also take a look at the SMART results from the drive to make sure that there are no issues. If you have the drive and the controller set to sleep you can change the settings to have them never sleep which should alleviate the time they’re taking to wake. Power issues can also affect spin up time.

Uff, you're speaking chinese to me. They're both connected directly to the motherboard, if that's what you mean. Are the SMART results something I can find somewhere or would I have to find some testing software? I'd assume some of these power settings at least to be in the BIOS, yes? I'll check once I'm home from work.

 

[mwroobel]

Uff, you're speaking chinese to me. They're both connected directly to the motherboard, if that's what you mean. Are the SMART results something I can find somewhere or would I have to find some testing software? I'd assume some of these power settings at least to be in the BIOS, yes? I'll check once I'm home from work.

What OS are you running and what motherboard? You say the POST is slow, just it just sit there after everything populates or does it take time for each section of the POST screen to appear? Do you not even see a display for longer than you would expect? Is this new behavior or has it always been this way?

 

[Smoblikat]

I have the same issue with my reds, both 6tb and 8tb, once they go to sleep they take a good 5 - 10 seconds to spin back up. I usually forget theyre asleep, go to download somthing (downloads folder on my spinner) and then my entire web browser hangs until the drive gets back to its job. This behavior might have also killed one of my drives, as its pretty new but I think the off/on stuff is the reason its clicking/bumping. You may look into changing your windows power profile to disable hard disk sleep (set it to 0 minutes).

In my case it isnt due to the SATA controller shutting down either, as I have SATA SSDs as game drives, and theyre always ready to go.

 

[Ayoralyn]

What OS are you running and what motherboard? You say the POST is slow, just it just sit there after everything populates or does it take time for each section of the POST screen to appear? Do you not even see a display for longer than you would expect? Is this new behavior or has it always been this way?

I'm running Windows 10 on a MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WIFI. The behavior has been there since I build the PC back in march this year. In regards to the POST, the PC starts, and there's just a black screen with a "_" curser blinking. Then after 5-10 seconds it continues and shows whatever it's showing in regards to the first harddrive, then shortly after the 2nd harddrive. I have 2 WD REDs. I honestly think the POST runs just fine, it just takes a while for the REDs to start.

I don't know too much about the difference between the different mechanical drives out there. Like, WD RED vs. WD Blue or Black for instance. But I'd think that maybe that's due to the fact that the drives were designed to be on 24/7 in a NAS, so it takes a bit longer for them to start, compared to other harddrives? I don't remember having "issues" such as these on older PC's at least.

The issue in Windows itself seems to have been fixed by changing the settings for when harddrives should go to sleep. I changed it to 0 minutes. I might be wrong, but my logic tells me then that it's not the SATA controller shutting down, yes? It simply was because Windows told the harddrives to shut down after 20 minutes. I'm not sure anything can be done during POST, and in all fairness, it doesn't bother me when it's just during POST. It bothered me when it was happening several times a day when I wanted to access either harddrive.

I have the same issue with my reds, both 6tb and 8tb, once they go to sleep they take a good 5 - 10 seconds to spin back up. I usually forget theyre asleep, go to download somthing (downloads folder on my spinner) and then my entire web browser hangs until the drive gets back to its job. This behavior might have also killed one of my drives, as its pretty new but I think the off/on stuff is the reason its clicking/bumping. You may look into changing your windows power profile to disable hard disk sleep (set it to 0 minutes).

In my case it isnt due to the SATA controller shutting down either, as I have SATA SSDs as game drives, and theyre always ready to go.

Yup, that's exactly how my harddrives behave. In Windows, it did fix it by changing the power settings as you and other suggested.

 

[Luke M]

The default Windows setting doesn't work anyway, drives don't stay spun down. So always disable it.