Beware of aggressive APM on Windows 10 Build 1809

[chrcoluk]

As far as I am aware many modern HDDs no longer recognise the APM protocol. They control their head parking independently usually via their own propriety software that can adjust the behaviour.

I have observed this on both Seagate and Western Digital drives.

My only working spindles that react to APM adjustments are my extremely decades old WD black and WD raptor drives.

In the power schema settings is a drive spindown setting, every HDD I have used in windows honours what that is configured to, and for head parking use wdidle, and for seagate seachest tools.

Personally I dont suggest disabling parking completely, it has its benefits, just to set it to something sane so its not constantly going in and out. I would disable spindown though.

 

[rapomStager]

HDD also do head parking oscillation due to HDD vibration and also due to poor SATA-cable connection.
If your HDD park itself despite your APM (power management) settings, or AAM (acoustic for old HDD) settings, or power management setting on OS, then obviously it is caused by hardware failure.

Vibration came from dry bearing, you can't fix this except for securing the HDD to heavier chassis to dampen the vibration. As for poor SATA-cable connection, you must inspect if there's deformation to the plastic connector and replace the cable when you see one.

It helps to install more than 1 HDD, so you can confirm it is hardware issue.