Periodic Noise from Head Movement WD Black 4TB

Internal Drives WD Gold
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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

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Hi, Started using my 12TB WD purple drive and the initial noise + the 5 sec PWL clunking noise scared the cr*p out of me.
Anyway…

  1. had to make an account to comment here.
  2. wondering why no admin/engineer has left a comment here in ~8 years.
  3. if its a hardware level feature (perhaps it has some simple 5 second counter), I’m wondering if there is some soldering trick anyone is aware of
  4. if it uses clock from PC driver, it should be modifiable perhaps via CrystalDisk or something
  5. maybe WD can make a compromise (like do it 100 times on the hour, every hour :smiley: ) (add disclaimer to void warranty if disabled completely)
  6. just fyi WD, I’m not returning the large drives, I’m going to allow them to p1ss me off and will complain instead :smiley: - this is a stupid problem not to have a mitigation mechanism

Edit: for now, to shut up the PWL, I’ve set the drive to spin down when not in use after 5 minutes (using HDDscan Power Management) - will see if the ~10 second drive spinup delay (and the added motor wear I suppose as well) is a more manageable tradeoff.

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The hard disk heads on modern high capacity disks can be heard but that is due to a larger number of heads in the assembly, this is not of concern and use the disk for storage

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is the chunking noise call Preventive wear levelling sound like a bass sound or like you tapping to the empty wooden box? I have the noise with my HC550 18Tb and really need your help

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I rec’d this past Saturday, 31 Aug 2024, a WD Black 4TB from an online reseller. It is brand new in the original box and sealed anti-static bag but it was manufactured in Sep 2023 in Thailand.

I installed it on Saturday and noticed that very annoying clunking sound occurring every 5 seconds when the drive is in idle mode which I now know from this thread is the PWL “feature”. WD should be able to implement the PWL “feature” in a much more soundless way. Time for their engineers to put their thinking caps on and hearing aides into their ears and improve their PWL “feature” design". Or make the action frequency user adjustable somehow.

What I found that worked for me was mounting the drive upside down on some stick-on rubber boots and not mechanically attaching it to the desktops tower’s drive rack with screws. For whatever reason the clunking noise was not as loud when the drive was mounted horizontally upside down. It is still doing the PWL thingy every 5 seconds (when I touch the drive case I can feel it) but when I put the side panel of my tower computer back in place, I now cannot hear it outside the computer. I ordered a more professional 3.5 mounting bracket with shock absorbers to be able to physical secure the drive better for the long term. But having it just setting there in the one drive bay, upside down, using rubber boots to isolate it; the annoying sound is no longer hearable outside the computer. Just passing along my solution.

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PWL is typical with hard disks as the areal density does tend to push the media to the limit

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If your WD Black 4TB hard drive is making periodic noise during head movement, it could indicate normal drive activity, minor wear, or a potential mechanical issue. It’s advisable to back up your data and run diagnostic tests to ensure the drive’s health.