Hi all,
I just received my first ever 4x Western Digital Gold 6 TB (WD6002FRYZ), which I inserted into a brand new Synology DS418play NAS.
Quite immediately after getting started, I was struck by an incredibly annoying “clucking/chunking/choppy” sound. There is possibly also always a “raspy tapping/clicky sound” just before the chunk. This happens every 5 seconds, even when idle, and seems to happen 24/7. I’m not yet sure if it’s just one drive responsible for the sound, or all 4x of them.
Audio clips below – the sound is actually quite loud in reality even though it has a somewhat “muffled character”. I’ve also heard it make some “sharper sounds” with roughly the same mechanics:
By now, I’ve had them for a few days and I’ve completed the initial RAID/SHR configuration, I’ve run extended S.M.A.R.T tests from Synology DiskStation and they seem healthy. I haven’t been able to test them with some Western Digital utility as they’re NAS drives. Yet the clucking sound every 5 seconds, even when idle, is quite frankly driving me a little crazy.
I read somewhere here that frequent noises could possibly be due to a WD feature called “PWL”, but at the same time this support page – “How To Tell If The Noise or Sound An Internal Drive Makes is Normal” – seems to suggest that recurring clunking sounds are abnormal:
https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=568
https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=197&lang=en
