Seagate head parking - need assistance / guidance

[talormanda]

I was given an almost new Seagate BarraCuda Pro 4TB (ST4000DM006). It works great except for the fact that my sensitive hearing always tunes into what I believe to be the head parking every 9-10 seconds. I am not an expert with drives, but is there something I can do to prevent this from happening so much? Googling tells me perhaps this the EPC setting that I can change with openSeaChest or SeaChestUtilities.

I am looking for clarification / reassurance if anything. If changing the setting is bad, what to set it to, etc. I am unsure what the Idle a,b,c,standby_z things are in the below command.

C:\Users\talor\Downloads\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64-Non-RAID>SeaChest_PowerControl_x64_windows.exe -d PD0 --showEPCSettings
==========================================================================================
 SeaChest_PowerControl - Seagate drive utilities - NVMe Enabled
 Copyright (c) 2014-2021 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved
 SeaChest_PowerControl Version: 3.0.2-2_2_3 X86_64
 Build Date: Jun 17 2021
 Today: Wed Apr  6 10:29:58 2022        User: talor (admin)
==========================================================================================

\\.\PhysicalDrive0 - ST4000DM006-2G5107 - ZC1CJJHH - ATA
.

===EPC Settings===
        * = timer is enabled
        C column = Changeable
        S column = Savable
        All times are in 100 milliseconds

Name       Current Timer Default Timer Saved Timer   Recovery Time C S
Idle A     *1            *1            *1            1             Y Y
Idle B     *1200         *1200         *1200         4             Y Y
Idle C      0             6000          6000         42            Y Y
Standby Z   0             9000          9000         190           Y Y

[vonericsen]

Hi @talormanda,

Great question!
The EPC feature (Extended Power Conditions) is designed for power savings, and how a vendor accomplishes this may vary.
The idle states and standby states go from most power used to least power used in this order according to the standard:

idle_a -> idle_b -> idle_c -> standby_y -> standby_z

Seagate markets this feature as "Power Choice" and has a document describing how it works and the energy savings it provides and what happens in the different modes here.

In the document above, it describes the heads are parking in idle_b and lower states, so this is the transition you are likely hearing from your drive when it goes into this lower power mode as it is not receiving commands for that time period and starts saving power by parking the heads.
The timer value we see shows this happens after 2 minutes of inactivity (1200 * 100 = 120000 milliseconds).
After the head has parked, when the drive receives a command requiring media access (read, write and some others) it will load the head over the media again to service these commands.

You have a couple options on how to solve this.

1. You can disable the idle_b timer with openSeaChest_PowerControl -d <handle> --idle_b disable
2. You can adjust the timer for the idle_b so that it goes into this state less frequently openSeaChest_PowerControl -d <handle> --idle_b newTimerValue.

Even if you change this timer or disable it, the operating system may request parking the heads with the idle command specifying an unload. I do not know if this will be issued by your OS though.

There will be no harm disabling idle_b as long as you do not care about the power savings it gives. I do not have a good recommendation for the timer value right now and you may find that it does not help as it would change the frequency you hear this at instead.
Since the other states, idle_c and standby_z, are not active, you do not need to worry about them right now, but could use a similar process to change them with these tools.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

[talormanda]

Yes this does help. I am testing it now and I believe it is working. I set it to 30 minutes. You are correct that the OS (I am on windows 11) could also be causing the head to park because when I was hearing the chirping, it was every 9 seconds which isn't the 2 minutes it is set to. But once the OS was on for a bit..this seemed to stop. So I suspect the OS is doing some indexing or disk verification on boot for a bit. I will reply back if my testing changes but so far so good.