Disk access every 4 seconds: Driving me mad!

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have a new WD SE 4TB drive that I’ve had for around a week.  For the first few days, the drive has been extremely quiet. and almost silent when idling.  This what I want, since I use the drive as an online back up medium in a VERY quiet home office.

However, for the past couple of days, the drive has started “ticking” every 4 seconds.  It’s not an alarming or strange sound: it just sounds like a single disk read, happening every 4 seconds.

At first, I thought it must be my computer doing it and I searched for background processes and tasks that might be the culprit, but found none.  So I tried powering the drive up whilst disconnected from the computer, and guess what - it STILL does the 4 second “ticks”.

It’s driving me mad - it’s impossible to concentrate hearing this happen every 4 seconds, all day, every day.  Does anyone know what’s causing this and more importantly what can be done to stop it?  As I say, it did not make this noise for the first few days.

I have read it may be  perhaps some background media scan happening?  Is that right?  Can this be disabled?

Or is it possible the drive is failing?  (It passes all DLG tests OK.)

Thanks

2

Hi there and welcome to the WD community.

Do you know if there is any system check software on the computer that might access the drive. When you ran DLG, did you do a fill test or a quick test. 

3

Hi

Thanks for the note and the welcome.

As I say, the drive does this even if not connected to the computer, so we can rule out any compuier processes.

Regards DLG, I only ran a quick test.  I started a full test but since it was going to take hours to run, I cancelled it.

EDIT:  For some strange reason, the disk has stopped its 4 second ticks.  I don’t know whether it was doing some background media scan and has now finished, or what.  But at least it has stopped and is not driving me mad any more!

Thanks all.