Noisy HDDs in idle state

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have two WD Black internal HDDs which yield constant noise while they are in idle state - not reading nor writing.
I know that the HDDs aren’t reading/writing because that all partitions are unmounted.
Also I’ve tried to disable the SATA port (to which the HDDs are connected) via the motherboard and the noise persists the same. (<-- Note that this is a bug - meaning that the HDD shouldn’t be fully active when the SATA port is disabled by the motherboard.)

The constant noise is originated from the rotation of the motor and the platter.

When I send both HDDs to a Standby State, then the PC gets very quiet.
Note that I have 2 CPU fans and 3 Case fans (cheap) and all of these fans (total 5 fans) barely make any noise compared to those HDDs.
The noise from the HDDs isn’t extremely loud, but compared to the fans it is too much loud, while it feels unnecessary to be forced to hear that when the environment is quiet.

Could WD kindly suggest a direct solution to this problem, in exchange for performance?
For those people who can’t afford buying additional expensive chassis or similar products that mask the problem…
Not all people want (or need) performance all the time.

Edit (5 March 2017, 12:50 UTC):
I’ve also tried to minimize the noise from the vibrations by:

  1. Removing one HDD from the PC (includes unplugging the SATA & Power cables + physically removing it from the chassis).
  2. Placed a single HDD on top of a not-too-thin-nor-too-thick foam that is placed on the bottom of the chassis.

But still the HDD is noisy in idle state (due to the rotation of the motor and platter).

The noise is a concern to many users and it would be very helpful if you could release a firmware patch that allows to adjust the RPM of each HDD, according to the user’s usage.
For example:

  • When the user is surfing the web - the user would manually modify the HDD’s RPM to 3000 or even slower.
  • When the user needs high performace (server or prior to loading an app/game) - then the user would increase the RPM to the available maximum.

Here’s an example for someone with WD Blue that has 7200 RPM and is experience relatively loud noise due to the rotation:
https://community.wd.com/t/wd-blue-idle-noise/175873

WD, please provide a solution.

2

Comparing fan noise to HD noise is not a good comparison. I have an internal Black drive in an external drive enclosure. They are not the quietest drives I have in my drive collection, they can be heard better than others, tho, but there is nothing wrong with the drive. “Bad” noise is very easy to detect; it make a racket, and doesn’t appear you are experiencing this.

3

Comparing every noise to every other noise is an excellent & legitimate comparison, because that this is the real world where every noise matters.

4

I am having the same issue with 3 - 4tb Western Digital Gold Enterprise drives that I bought for a Dell T130. I am trying to get some support for the issue but my first attempt failed because I did buy the drives from Dell.

I posted a .WAV file in my Public OneDrive folder of the noise. The sound clip is about 3 minutes long. The link is below.

https://1drv.ms/f/s!AGd5qoQXc-UpfQ

I hope the link works.

5

Could any official WD worker / support rep. please respond ?

6

If you would prefer dedicated assistance then perhaps it would be best to E-mail WD Support about this. You can do so in the following link:

http://support.wdc.com/support/case.aspx?lang=en

Bear in mind the WD Community is a forum for users. Even though WD personnel may post once in awhile, WD Support has official, direct communication channels.