HACKER Q&A
📣 _ompc

Do you know why new high-capacity WD drives make this weird noise?


I recently bought two 8TB WD Gold drives, and they happen to be the noisiest drives I've heard in about 20 years. However the weirdest aspect of it is that they make a sound like a floppy drive regularly when not under load. There's a huge thread on the WD forum with other people experiencing this across multiple ranges and sizes: https://community.wd.com/t/strange-noise-coming-from-10tb-drives-wd100efax/226467/240

This audio clip captures the type of sound: https://clyp.it/ltzgugcu

~260 posts and 2 years in, nobody has a clue what it is and WD won't explain it either. The common factors seem to be running them in a software RAID on home servers. It's weird and it's quite irritating, so does anyone on HN have any ideas?

I bought Gold drives so I wasn't expecting silence, but this seems to be prevalent across the Red Pro and Red range too.

  👤 cjbconnor Accepted Answer ✓
I've experienced the same issue across 14 different WD red drives, mixed 10/8tb and helium/air filled. Whenever the pair in my Synology do it, the sound resonates so loud you can hear it across the house. I've tried everything to get them to stop, but sometimes they still make the noise for 30+ minutes at a time.

I initially thought part of the issue might be due to the drives being mounted directly to the case so I bought a set of anti-vibration rubber drive mounts, but it didn't help at all.

👤 sylwester
It might be the head parking / reentering. This is called "load cycle" count. You might check smartctl and see if the number of load cycles increases after each time you hear that sounds.

I've had this problem with my Seagate Exos X 14TB. In the end I've disabled the idle2 timer, which is resposible to park the head after 2m of inactivity. This resulted in 1000 load cycles just after I had the disk for 100h somehow.

👤 p0d
I don't know but I'm glad you shared as I like quiet (and wd disks).

Sounds like something is moving mixed with case vibration. I can only guess it is the arm which moves across the platters. Are you using zfs, mdm? Maybr the raid is at work.

I bought a small factor pc recently which is a little noisy. I rest it on sponge pad. I also discovered setting a speaker on a specific spot much reduces the noise.

I look forward to hearing the cause of your problem.