My drives are making the ■■■■ noise as I’m writing this.
No other drives are as silent as the WD 10 TB drives is most of the time, so I guess I just have to live with it. I’ve made a soundproofed box for my NAS, it helps isolating the sound a bit.
Yeah, there must be some sort of procedure that produces this sound. But it doesn’t seem that WD will ever disclose what the origin of the sound is.
Your English is fine btw, no worse than mine 
Since u are bumping the thread, I´ll give my input to.
My 2x 10TB WD RED drives still doesnt make any sound at all, as solo drives.
When i had them in RAID before, as most of you have… I had the same error noise. It was so annoying that i removed them, moved all files and made them solo drives instead.
It’s a very interesting observation. Most of us do use the drives in raid, but some don’t. And even they have had similar noise issues. It’s very interesting that raid, by most accounts, plays a role in this. So whatever procedures that runs on the drives, they are probably related to raid operations.
Very interesting indeed! How come we didn’t think to test this before? I’m assuming you ran your drives in RAID-1? I have mine in RAID-5 (single redundancy), so I guess the mode doesn’t matter much.
Would be interesting if Blues or Greens or whatever didn’t have this noise in RAID. 
I use RAID-6, so the raid level probably doesn’t matter.
Due to Corona I have to work from home and the drives drives me mental 
As far as I know the problem seem to be mainly a 10TB (+?) problem. In other words, the latest drives.
Blues and Greens are older drives, please correct me if I’m wrong.
So I assume they would be fine. My older 4TB Red’s are unaffected by this as well.
I’d like to chime in with the same problem as documented in the clips posted here! I am running two WD80EFAX in a QNAP TS-251. Upgraded from two 4TB Seagates (which never made that particular sound over years of use) last year and being annoyed by that sound ever since. It is coming and going, but occurs at least once per day for at least a quarter of an hour (sometimes more often and usually for a longer period of time). I do believe it is more likely to occur late in the evening or at night, but that might just be me being more likely to be at home during those hours. I don’t think the NAS is doing anything special while the noise is on, certainly no file transfers or Plex use. I have never tried to “interrupt” the noise with some task (just thinking about this while writing these lines).
I noticed that the two HDD indicators usually blink rapidly during normal HDD use, but while that noise occurs, they are solidly lit.
I am running only Plex and stock software on my NAS, but also did that with the old harddrives. I tried to deactive some of the stock software where I thought it safe to do so (not much experience with NAS, I am really just a casual home user), but that didn’t fix the issue for me. Have not yet tried to stop Plex, but not running Plex would defeat 90% of my use-case, so not really an option.
Dear Ruprecht. Stopping Plex will likely not help out. I would know because I have no Plex server running on my NAS (basically the same setup QNAP NAS 451+, four 10tb Red discs, see also my earlier posts in this thread). The plex server runs on a separate computer with more CPU juice. I have had this noise coming out of these discs since day one in autumn 2018. I doubt that it is an indicator of faulty drives as ‘something’ would have happened to them within that period I suppose. They have been really stable in raid 5 during this period. The annoyance it generates, not knowing what is really going on and the fact that WD does not acknowledge this is a different cup of tea though, and also serves as an important reason for why I still follow this thread with great interest. Best Regards Trond
Just for info and to add to the topic
I also have the noise problem with 12TB RED’s (WD120EFAX) in my recently upgraded Synology NAS using SHR with an EXT4 volume.
I never heard these noises in my old NAS (also running SHR & EXT4) with the 4TB RED’s (WD40EFRX)
It’s a strange and annoying one
Thanks for the reply.
There is no doubt this is a widespread problem. I wonder if WD will ever recognize the issue.
So far they haven’t acknowledge it, only telling us the noise is a normal HDD sound. It most definitely isn’t.
Same here…
bought a new Synology NAS DS1819+ 8Bay.
Installed 4 new WD RED 12TB Harddrives (WD120EFAX), which act normal in a external dockingstation. They all where bought from different distributors on different dates. All drives checked via Crystal Disk, HDTune, all values are perfect.
Since day one there are following sounds, contacted Synology, they say “sounds not unusual”. and they are right, als long its not the NAS.
We have 5 Synologys, nothing comparable never heard such a “beeping sound” on any device, they all have other HD Brands installed.
The sounds appear all of a sudden from a drive to another and disapear again, there is no timeschedule or you can say which drive will start.
On Diskload these sounds dont appear. Casing , fan, etc looking fine to me, nothing moving, vibrating, shaking etc.
I never heard a drive like this, they are running… hope they keep alive, but the sound is so annoying, because its in my workspace. Next drives, for sure something different, most expensive test i ever did.
Regards,
Datahoarder
Yeah, that sound is VERY familiar. What you are describing it’s exactly my experience as well, along with of the rest of the guys here.
So the HDD’s are working well, speed wise, stability wise and noise levels, except when the drives makes that sound that drills into your eardrum. It’s a loud nagging sound, like WD sat around a table and came up with the most annoying sound ever.
I tried Seagate’s equivalent 10 TB drive, and I must say, while WD has his horrible sound, they run pretty quiet the rest of the time. That’s not the case for the Seagates, in my opinion. They make way more loud chattering sounds and are more loud in general, 100% of the time(under constant load)
So I had to return the drive, it was just too loud for my use case.
So yeah, for me I’m stuck with the d*mn WD 10 TB+ drives. It’s like being stuck with Lloyd beside me.
Yes indeed the Seagates are louder! They turn at 7,2k, thanks for your advice, ill keep that in mind, but they have some advantages, which i invesitgate next time, well see.
For me clicking and scrubbing never was a problem, this beeping sound and ignorance from wd drives is just not acceptable.
Well see. may i put the WDs in a Synolgy Expansion Unit as cold storage if my capacity limit is reached and try something different, ill keep you updated.
Just for documentation:
1x Volume: 2x Samsung Pro 265GB SSDs in Raid 1 which contains Docker running, Pi-Hole, OpenVPN, Nextcloud, 4 Deluge / Rutorrent instances each with VPN.
1x Volume: 4x WD RED 12TB SHR1, BTRFS just Datastorage
Stay healthy, regards,
Datahoarder
I have exactly the same strange noise with 4x 10 TB WD Red and a Synology DS918+.
SMART values are fine but as one said before the noise is annoying and is only present when there is no drive activity.
I hope there is a solution for this soon.
It’s been 18 months since I created this thread, so I’m not very optimistic there will be a fix for this. WD doesn’t acknowledge there even is a problem 
I have a feeling that the sound is due to a design flaw, or a by-product of some sorts. So it might not be fixable and WD just ignores it, instead of risking drops in sales if they acknowledge it publicly.
Hopefully they work on the problem for future drives, but to my knowledge all current drives bigger than 10 TB have this problem, so we are screwed unless the problem can be fixed in the firmware. And I’m guessing any drives released in the near future will have the same design(?).
Hi all,
same strange noise here. I just installed 2 WD80EFAX (8 TB, raid 1 configuration) in my QNAP nas TS-851:
Yes, the sound is very similar. It’s been reported in this thread that some 8 TB models are producing the same sound, and I think we can, with this recording, conclude that WD80EFAX definitely have the same problem as the bigger drives. There are several different models of the 8TB, so all of them might not suffer from this.
Well, it means that unfortunately I will have to endure the noise. I hope this, however, does not compromise data integrity. Has anyone had such problems?
There is no indication this impacts stability, longevity, or speed. In terms of statistics, they are pretty similar to older/smaller drives from WD, if this noise was a problem we should see significant higher numbers for drive failures, considering all the drives that are known to produce this sound.
Just purchased 2 x WD80EFAX (8TB) drives for my QNAP and after a couple of days they have started to make a noise. After a quick Google search, this thread came up and the sound recording at the start of this thread is exactly the same as my drives. Shame it’s not been recognised as an issue by WD, as the NAS sits just behind my TV and the sound is easily audible when watching stuff
Also hearing this exact noise with my drive… really disappointed after spending so much money on this drive I can’t stand to hear it on all the time. Will buy NOT-western digital going forward.
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