Hi, I recently purchased two WD Red 3TB NAS drives. I have them in a Raid 1 setup within a Synology DS218+. I am fairly happy with the performance of the drives. However, I am not at all happy with the noise the drives make on writes. I am quiet surprised by my experience because most people referenced it as a quite drive and I can hear the rights from several rooms away.
This seems abnormal to me. I can’t remember ever having a platter based drive this loud before.
Does anyone have any suggestion on how to reduce the noise level? Or is it possible that this is a hardware issue? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
WD Red 3TB drives are usually fairly quiet, but some clicking or chatter during write activity is normal, especially when they are installed in a NAS like the Synology DS218+. NAS systems often run background tasks such as indexing, syncing, or other services, which makes the drives seek more often and can make the noise more noticeable. However, if the sound is loud enough to hear from several rooms away, it may be due to vibration from the enclosure or the surface the NAS is sitting on. Make sure the drives are properly seated in the trays, the screws are tight, and try placing the NAS on a stable surface or on rubber padding to reduce vibration. It’s also worth checking the S.M.A.R.T. status and running a health test in Storage Manager to rule out any hardware issues. If everything checks out and performance is normal, the noise is likely just normal drive activity, but if it seems unusually loud or irregular, it could be worth contacting WD support to have the drives checked or replaced.
If it’s specifically write activity that’s loud rather than random clicking at idle, I’d look beyond the drives themselves. The DS218+ chassis can amplify seek noise surprisingly well, especially with two identical drives seeking in sync during RAID 1 writes, making normal actuator chatter sound much worse than it really is.
A quick way to isolate it is to pull one drive, test each disk individually outside the NAS (USB SATA dock or a PC with SMART extended tests), and compare the acoustic profile. If both drives sound the same and SMART is clean, it’s probably enclosure resonance rather than bad hardware. Also check whether Btrfs scrubbing, thumbnail indexing, Synology Drive, or Hyper Backup jobs are running, since those generate constant small random writes that make NAS drives sound far busier than they do in a desktop. A healthy WD Red shouldn’t be audible several rooms away on its own, so if the noise disappears once the drive is out of the enclosure, the NAS is the amplifier, not the source.
