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+1 for shucking the drive. I got a few WD externals (14 TB). They exhibited the exact behaviour described by OP. Essentially the drive slept every 15 minutes or so.

Smartctl on a timer didn’t work. Touch on a timer didn’t work. I can’t recall if hdparm or some other tuning of sleep and head parking settings worked.

Taking the drive out of the enclosure worked. It got so much quieter too.

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This is so weird. I have a few of the 10TB and 12TB WD EasyStores. I've been using them regularly for years and have never experienced anything like this.

Just to be clear, the drive does go to sleep when it's actually idle. Not while it's being used, though. IOW, they work as expected.

What distro/kernel version are you on? I mostly use Debian stable, which means a pretty old kernel. I wonder if it could be a regression in more recent ones?

I also use the drives with FreeBSD and have never had an issue there, either.

I'm also curious if it's aggressive USB power saving attempts with autosuspend. From my limited exploration autosuspend is usually off and e.g. requires powertop to enable (on Ubuntu LTS) or manual fiddling, but may be worth checking.

This was Arch without any special kernel, so a fairly recent one. It was a few months ago. Don’t recall the specific version.

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