URGENT: HDD pinging at 100% constantly. Help please!

[sebastiantombs]

But, but, they can say the same of us!

 

[IAmATeaf]

If you ever saw a hard drive, internally, in operation you'd change your mind very quickly. When the drive is fresh it will write in a more "linear" fashion, but once some deletions occur the fragmentation makes the head move all over the width of the disk. It can look like a sewing machine needle in high speed operation.

I fully understand how the internals of a hard drive work, I actually wrote code to perform low level formatting of drives at sector level.

Fragmentation is fragmentation. When I replaced my old 2Tb drives in my BI machine which had been in use for almost 2 years, formatted using the default 4K I decided to check the fragmentation on the drive. I tried 3 utilities on both drives and they reported that the disk did not need a defrag run. Was a bit of a surprise but then when you think about what BI does it all makes sense.

There is no evidence to suggest that increasing the block size increases HDD longevity.