WD 3.5" Green 3TB HDD causing longer boot times

[Coup27]

I have an issue on my system where my WD 3.5" Green 3TB WD30EZRX HDD is causing my boot time to increase.

When I power on from cold the boot time is ~18 seconds. If I reboot it is ~8 seconds. If I power on from cold with the HDD disconnected the boot time is ~8 seconds and if I reboot with it disconnected it is also ~8 seconds. When I power on from cold with the HDD connected I can hear it working away once the boot sequence gets to a certain stage with the Windows 7 logo but this cannot be heard when I reboot. It is like the drive is very slow initialising after the first power on.

Has anybody seen this before?

My backup drive is nearly full now so I need to get another 3TB HDD for backing up. I am thinking of getting a HGST drive to go into my computer and making the Green as my backup drive as I find the Green quite annoying. I have to wait for access when I haven't accessed it for a while and it makes a soft thumping sound while in operation but am I likely to arrive at boot up problem again using a different HDD?

Thanks for any help.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I have seen that sort of thing (BIOS taking a long time to scan down the drive) from drives that were getting ready to fail. Sometimes it's just a matter of replacing a bad SATA cable though.

 

[Charlie98]

Take it out of the boot sources in the BIOS so it won't search it when cold booting.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Just the BIOS being pokey, poking at everything attatched to anything to make sure everything is working as intended. Typically, it takes extra time if hardware that wasn't connected at shutdown happens to be connected.

 

[bbhaag]

Take it out of the boot sources in the BIOS so it won't search it when cold booting.

This is what I had to do with some of my internal storage drives. It was taking the BIOS forever to scan and recognize them. Once I took them out of the boot sequence BIOS and Windows loaded much faster.

 

[WilliamM2]

I have noticed that if I write an image in Windows to my GPT 3TB drive using the built in imaging tool, the system then takes much longer to boot.

Did you write an image by any chance? Sadly, the only way I found to fix it was to format the drive. It's a known issue with GPT drives I found by googling. I was also able to repeat the issue. I now write the images to a smaller non-GPT 1TB drive.

 

[Frost_WD]

Hello Coup27,


I do not think it is a drive problem, as the others suggested it could very well be connected to your BIOS settings. However, you should run a Data Lifeguard diagnostics test, just to be on the safe side. Here is a link: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id= After you have done the extended test you can post the SMART data here.
Generally the WD Green is a back up/secondary storage drive, it is developed as an energy efficient and quiet device. If you are looking for a performance drive you could consider the WD Black.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you can hear unusual noises coming from a piece of hardware that is a bad sign, so be sure to test the drive, do a backup of all the important data, and if there are bad sectors of the drive is making weird sounds (provided you are still within your limited warranty period) ask for an RMA here: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=



Keep us posted,
Frost_WD

 

[jkauff]

Are you sure the problem isn't just your Green drive using its power saving mode? I have several external Greens and before I found a WD utility to turn off the power saving, it always took 10 seconds or so for these drives to spin up.

I agree with other posters that you need a faster boot disk. The best solution, of course, is moving Windows to an SSD. A WD Black will help (I have two of them) but they're still slow compared to my Samsung 840 Pro, which boots up almost instantly.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Are you sure the problem isn't just your Green drive using its power saving mode? I have several external Greens and before I found a WD utility to turn off the power saving, it always took 10 seconds or so for these drives to spin up.

I agree with other posters that you need a faster boot disk. The best solution, of course, is moving Windows to an SSD. A WD Black will help (I have two of them) but they're still slow compared to my Samsung 840 Pro, which boots up almost instantly.

Wouldn't have to be a boot drive.

You could be booting from the fastest PCI-E SSD RAID Array on earth - your BIOS is still going to spin up all your disks and wait for an "all clear" signal from them before handing off to the bootlaoder.

 

[Puffnstuff]

What does the smart status say about all of your drives?

 

[Coup27]

Thanks for the replies. I've spent a bit of time on this today and can update with the following:

I am on the latest BIOS and I have been through all the settings. Regarding boot settings there is only one setting I can change which is SATA support. I can choose all devices, all HDD's or boot drive only. Naturally I have this set to boot drive only. There are no other options relating to HDD's and the boot up process.

The only other possibly useful setting is inside Advanced SATA Configuration. Aggressive LPM was set to auto. I changed this to disabled and also disabled it in IRST but there was no change.

Just to rule it out I did run the drive through the extended test of WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (which took 8 hours) but there were no errors. Looking at the SMART data everything has a Green tick next to it.

@jkauff, I wouldn't have thought the power saving features would kick in during boot sequence? Maybe Frost_WD can answer that?

To clarify a couple of other points:

● This is not my boot drive. I have an SSD for that. This is my bulk storage drive.

● I have not wrote an image to it using the Windows imaging tool.

● The soft thumping sound I described has been present since day 1. I am inclined to believe it is by design. Some drives crunch, this one thumps instead.


Moving onto some more conclusive testing, I have two old HDD's lying around: a WD Blue 3.5" 500GB (WD5000AAKS) and a Seagate Barracuda 7200 3.5" 250GB (ST3250820AS). I swapped out my 3TB Green for the Blue and the problem was gone. The Blue would boot from cold and reboot in ~8 seconds. I then swapped out for the Seagate and that would also boot from cold and reboot in ~8 seconds.

Both of those drives have MBR partition styles whereas my 3TB Green has GPT so I used diskpart clean to wipe the Seagate and I then initialised it with GPT and created a single partition and repeated the tests but there was no change. The drive still boots and reboots in ~8 seconds.

This leaves me to conclude 1 of 2 things is the culprit:

1. The 3TB Green is taking much longer to initialise because it is 3TB.

2. The 3TB Green is just slow at initialising from cold.

I do need to buy another 3TB drive for backing up anyway as my current backing up system is full. I want a cool and quiet drive in my computer as it is only for storage so I am concerned the Black series would be too noisey. I am also concerned it may suffer from the same slow initialisation as my current Green drive.

Welcome any more thoughts people have.

 

[jkauff]

I think #2 is your answer. I have 9 WD Green external drives, 8 on the same power strip. I leave the power strip turned off until after booting so the BIOS doesn't have to initialize all the drives.

I don't know how sensitive you are to noise, but my two Black drives are not noisy at all to my ears. They're only 1TB each, but they initialize very quickly. All my big disks are external.

 

[C1]

I use 2TB drives as externals and noticed that when these are on line during boot sequence, then boot is noticeably slower when the drives become full of data files/folders.

As an experiment, empty the green drive to, say, 20% of capacity then re-time the boot. Not sure about NTFS vs GPT, but there is a big difference in boot time between FAT vs NTFS formatting for the same drive with use of FAT being much slower.

 

[bradley]

What does the smart status say about all of your drives?

Would be the first thing I checked as well. The 'green' movement has dramatically shortened the usable life of many a good HDD with incessant spindowns. I would look at the SMART data for reallocated and uncorrectable sectors. In the meantime disable APM, if it isn't already.