Weird USB HDD performance

So I have a 1TB hard drive in a USB3.0 enclosure, I use it to store some videos. I should mention that the hard drive is an SSHD one pulled from a laptop, the enclosure I bought separately.
I haven't noticed any problems with transfers but playback directly from the drive is another story. When I play a video(usually 360p) I can hear the drive spin up every 10-60 seconds, some times these "spin ups" affect playback(pixelation, buffering) sometime it doesn't..it's like the drive is sleeping most of the time but that should be possible unless the OS and/or player is cashing some data and as soon the drive is "not in use" it goes to sleep. Is that possible? Any way to prevent this from happening? It's highly annoying to hear that "spin up" sound all the time, besides it can't be good for the drive.

Running W7 Pro x64, the drive perform exactly the same on two different laptops(same OS though). Player is VLC latest. It happens on both USB2.0 and USB3.0 connection. I also tried enabling write caching(Windows leave it disabled by default) but it does not make any difference.

 

ATG, it is a good idea to check drive's SMART attributes, and, if they're OK, try it in another enclosure. You may also want to adjust your power settings.

p.s. I have a hybrid drive in an USB3.0 enclosure, both Seagate and working well.

 

Almost all consumer HDDs these days have aggressive power saving features. That spin up and spin down is by design, many also have it hard-wired so you can't disable it, it basically caches a whole bunch of data to the RAM for viewing then engages power saving. I haven't seen a HDD other than the WD Black 3.5inch desktop which are capable of disabling the APM spin down (I did it via CrystalDiskInfo).
They used to make 2.5inch WD blacks which were also capable of disabling the APM spin down but those are hard to find now. I guess you only have 3 solutions:
1. Use Crystal Disk Info to try and enable AAM, at least this will limit the noise from the spin-ups
2. Get a 5400RPM HDD (preferably one with 500mb platters), these still have the APM but the slower motor doesn't make as much noise when spinning up/down.
3. Get a large USB flash drive and run your movies from there.

 

ATG, I believe the problem is the enclosure. I suggest you try that disk inside a laptop as secondary, or inside different enclosure.

 

I can't enable AAM but I did disable APM and it seems to be working better.

I can't test the disk with another enclosure right now because I'd have to buy one...

 

Yeah, the issue was very likely related to the spin up/down which seems to be extremely aggressive for that model. You're HDD has only been operational for only 143hrs yet has spun up 1158 times and started/stopped 10194 times out of a total of 12818 load/unload cycles. This means that your HDD was optimized for low power consumption and to aggressively power down when not in use.