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WD Makes Click Of Death A Feature

posted by jelizondo on Sunday July 27 2025, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the Clunk-Clunk-Clunk-Clunk-Clunk. dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Remember when a hard drive making a repeated grinding sound meant that it was time to backup the data, hope you get it all copied out in time, and prepare to send the hard drive to the great recycling factory in the sky? Fear not, Western Digital is on a mission to help you relive your click-of-death PSTD data loss nightmares with its latest invention: Preventive Wear Leveling aka PWL. The idea of PWL is simple, but the implementation can be a nightmare. It is supposed to move the hard drive mechanics every so often to prevent hard drive failure due to repeated limited motions. The catch is that on some drives the PWL kicks in every five seconds making an audible click that can be felt up to a meter away. This has been asked about on forums and as of July 2025 is still an issue in latest generation Western Digital hard drives that is driving people crazy with the grind and vibration occuring every five seconds. The click of death is now a feature.

Soylentils, do you have one of these drives? What is your experience with the WD five second click of death?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @01:08AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2025, @01:08AM (#1411777)

    Toshiba and others sell drives without this issue.

    FWIW doing an audible click every 5 seconds sounds like it would cause more damage than reduce damage. Think about it, should "preventive wear leveling" need to be every 5 seconds, or would 50 seconds or even 500 seconds be better numbers? Don't forget other drives have been running for years without such a stupid feature. So I suspect that these WD drives have a big problem that's not present in other drives.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Monday July 28 2025, @02:10AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Monday July 28 2025, @02:10AM (#1411781) Homepage

    Yeah, I had the same thought. That's a lot of excess motion to no apparent gain.

    I have a pair of spinning rust WDs right next to me that have been running 24/7 for most of 23 years, and are still error-free. They obviously did not need preventive wear leveling...

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.