Is the Scorpio Black supposed to change RPM after a few seconds idle?

I recently upgraded my Inspiron 1545 to a Scorpio Black 750GB Hard Drive. All was well at first, until I started noticing a constant sound like the cpu fan was running on low. I realized that it's the louder "air rushing sound" of the 7200rpm drive.

But, when I put my ear up to the laptop, and watched the HDD activity light, I noticed something. After 1 second or so, of no HDD activity the "air rushing" sound gets quieter (like the drive is spinning slower). Then, as soon as there is HDD activity again, the sound gets louder, along with a faint metallic click.

I ran a disk benchmark and the drive was louder the entire time. I would assume it's some kind of power saving feature, but it seems to be happening too frequently. It doesn't seem to correlate to load cycle counts, so it's not parking the heads when it does it.

These drives aren't advertised as being variable RPM, but that seems to be what I'm hearing. Any ideas? I just purchased this from compusa for a good price, and don't want to continue using it if this is unusual.

 

It's not variable rpm, maybe what you're noticing is the spinning down for powersaving.

 

It's not spinning down completely. I can still hear the drive running when it lowers the RPM. Is this a normal feature of power saving? I just want to make sure the drive isn't faulty, or that it isn't something with my laptop. My previous drive (Samsung HM250HI) didn't do anything like that.

 

I have never heard it the way you describe it but I think it's nothing to worry about.

Scorpio Blacks are the most noisy notebook drives I ever used.

 

Maybe it sounds different when the drive head is parked.

 

Other than the airflow noise, it's actually pretty quiet. I don't really notice any seek noise. When my laptop fan is on low, it drowns out the hard drive. I'll try not to worry about it, then

I have everything backed up, and I do have a 5 year warranty on it, after all. I will see if ATA vs AHCI mode makes a difference. I wonder if WDIDLE will change anything.?

I don't think it's head parking either. If it was, I'd be seeing the S.M.A.R.T. load/unload cycle count increase each time it does it. It happens literally half a second or so after there is no HDD activity, and does it over and over.

 

Yeah the noise isn't too bad, it just sounds like a fan.

The two 500GB ones I had had pretty strong vibrations though in small and light notebooks.

 

That's actually the hard drive reading from the platter. I really like it, it doesn't make the usual clicking noises and with the fan on, it's like the drive is not even there.

I'd suggest you disable or increase the time for the parking timer if it's still set at 8 seconds - I have an older 320 GB Scorpio Blue that accumulated over 100,000 head parks and started respinning (the motor would just cut and restart) when parking - I thought it was dying, but after disabling the head parking, it works pretty well.

However, I suspect WD uses the frequent parking since the heads are closer to the platter in their design (or so I read somewhere), so the possibility of a head crash is higher if you suddenly move or drop your laptop (more so on the 7200 rpm version), so you shouldn't disable it if it's a portable machine (mine is always on the desk, for example).

 

No such thing when my Scorpio Black was in my 3820TG, even less so in my N43SL since it doesn't fit in the 'small and light' category

 

Yep, every singleWD Black can be different, every notebook can be different and every end user can have different perception.

For what's it's worth, Chip.de found the Scorpio Blacks to be the most noisy hard drive available.
http://www.chip.de/bestenlisten/Bestenliste-Notebook-Festplatten--index/index/id/87/

 

So the increase in "air noise" is actually the read/write sound? Interesting if that's true. Its just weird to hear an oscillating air noise rather than the usual clicking.

100k is nothing. The Samsung HM250HI 250GB that I had in my Inspiron, had over 5 million load/cycle counts in 3800 or so power on hours. At 38 power on hours, the WD Black currently has 712. Thats way lower than the rate the number was increasing on the Samsung. The drive wasn't faulty though. It still ran flawlessly, and was nearly as fast as the Black. 80MB/sec Peak read, 65MB average. I actually upgraded because I wanted to upgrade the suspect 80GB in my PS3 with the Samsung.

I will try increasing the time in WDIDLE

Unfortunately I have a negative opinion of the Scorpio Blue series. My brother let me borrow his 320GB temporarily, and the motor had frozen up before I could even power it on. Repeating double beep.

The Black does vibrate, but not as much as my Samsung did.

 

I like it - it's drowned in the noise of the fan, unlike the Hitachi I have on my other laptop (same generation, but it has the normal clicking sounds when reading).

I had a Samsung HM160 (I think), but the head park count was about the same as power on/off cycle count. I gotta say that I always set the hard drive to never spin down and disable any power saver features.

I suppose my 320 GB Scorpio Blue may be faulty - I did have desktop drives go over 500,000 and still work well...