WD Black Makes a lot of noise when idle

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

So a few months ago I bought a 2TB WD Black drive.
Great drive but after a while it began making quite a lot of noise when it’s idle/not in use.
I use the drive for video encoding so it’s in use quite a lot but often when it’s not in use it will start making a noise for a while (30+ mins) and then randomly stopping. As far as I remember it didn’t do this at first but started after a a while.
The sound it makes sounds like a normal reading noise, like stuff is being read/written on it but as I said it only happens when it’s idle and I have the indexing off on that drive.

I know it sounds a bit vague but does anyone know what I mean and why it’s doing this and maybe a fix?
It’s annoying because I leave my pc on and it’s in my bedroom so often the drive will start making this noise and it will wake me up from my sleep.

2

Hello,

I recommend you take a look at the link below.

How to tell if the noise or sound the drive is making is normal

3

It basicly sounds like heavy load as far as I know. Weird thing is that it’s never being used when it happens.

4

Same issue with me. The drive sits there, and makes this rhythm that repeats every minute or so. I checked task manager under performance, and it shows that no disk operations are happening. I checked CrystalDiskInfo, and the drive is 100% healthy, with 0 read errors, and 0 bad sectors.
It may have to do with windows’ telemetry processes and antimalware services. Windows performs security scans and data collection in the background which sometimes involves reading disk info. This may only be noticeable with WD black drives as they are by far the loudest drives on the consumer end (excluding Seagate drives). I did notice that the program titled Antimalware Service Executable in task manager shows 0.1mbps of disk usage when the sound happens.

I am not sure of the cause, but these are my observations.

5

The choice to disable Windows Defender is a good option if you are currently running a third-party antivirus program. You may disable it using the following technique:

  1. Type gpedit.msc into the Admin Command Prompt window.
  2. Move to: Windows Components->Windows Defender->Administrative Templates in the computer’s configuration
  3. Select “Enabled” by double-clicking “Turn Off Windows Defender,” then click “Apply.”
    Please be aware that you might not be able to turn “Windows Defender” back on after turning it off. I advise you to create a backup copy or take a picture of it so you can restore the default settings if necessary.
    Also recommended to read guide fix Antimalware Service Executable how you can sort ou in other methods
6

The issue solved itself, so that wont be necessary. Even if it didnt fix itself, windows defender shouldnt be disabled ever! An antivirus serves a purpose, and recommending to disable it isn’t good advice.