Identifying and troubleshooting Western Digital hard drive noise issues There can be several reasons why a WD drive may be making a clicking noise: The drive is not getting enough power to fully spin up; The drive has failed; Occasional clicks during data access; Hard clicks during a head park operation (shutdown or sleep mode);…
Identifying and troubleshooting Seagate hard drive noise issues Today’s seagate hard drives are very quiet and usually the system fan noise covers the drive. When the system ventilation fans get dirty or out of balance they can begin to make noise. Sometimes the hard drive is suspected of making these new noises. Older hard drives…
All of seagate new Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives and new Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives are optimized for performance, they do not have a utility that can quiet them down.
While modern drives are extremely quiet, every hard drive makes a certain amount of noise while running. Normally, the faster the drive motor spins, the higher pitched the resulting sound will be.
It is also normal for the hard drive to make sort of a “chattering” or “clicking” sound while it is reading and writing data.
However, if the sound coming from the area around your hard drive has recently changed or is an excessive grinding or clanking noise, this may indicate a physical problem with the hard drive.
Noise from the cooling fans in the power supply are often mistaken as hard drive noise. To isolate whether the noise is coming from the drive or one of the fans, you can issue a “spin down” command through software. The Seagate SeaTools for DOS diagnostic has an acoustical spin down test.
If the sound goes away, then the sound was produced by the hard drive. If the sound remains, then the drive is not the cause of the sound.
