Periodic Noise from Head Movement WD Black 4TB

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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I was hoping that they would fix the issue by now. This is discouraging to hear. Perhaps it really is a technical issue they cannot overcome.

But you are right - it never was an issue before so what changed? Drives are bigger. Do they last longe now? Is it cost saving in some way? I may never know. I never did buy a drive and decided to make do with the space I have. I was honestly considering buying a new HD Black soon to test myself. Thanks for saving me that aggravation, clayh.

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I’m the OP on this thread and I suppose an update would be helpful. In the 6+ years since my original post, I’ve had around 12 of these WD Black drives (that all made the periodic noise) running in RAID setups (usually 4 drives per raid) for years and have never had one of them fail. They were used for musical instrument sample playback so there was a lot of really heavy non-sequential reads on a daily basis (barely any writing to disk, other than one-time installs of new sounds). I never had one go down. So it may definitely be helping with reliability.

I just started swapping them out this year. I simply ended up migrating to SSD drives when noise is a concern. They are pretty solid. Of course, if you need a LOT of storage then SSDs aren’t really an option yet.

I use some of the 18GB “Gold” drives for archives, and they make the same noise. Although they generally are not plugged in - only when I need to retrieve old projects.

1 Like
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Thanks for the follow-up, dobster!

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hard disks may be a tad noisy when the head assembly moves to the safe one when idle

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Just had to switch out my Seagate Barracuda 2TB from 2011 and bought a WD black 4TB from 2020 they were selling in a local store, the thumping is driving me insane. At first i didnt hear anything when i was trying to recover files from the old HDD but now when it’s mounted in my case it’s a tad annoying to say the least to hear a thump every 5sec. Is there nothing we can do still after so long? :sweat_smile:

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Open the windows disk optimization and set that for daily operation so the disk seeks are minimized