almost for the entire time I’ve owned it (little less than 2 years) my WD Red has been randomly making a weird dzzt like noise. It works like a charm otherwise, no errors in SMART, no errors in the system logs, only this weird as f*** noise (listen here: SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds at 0:01 and 0:08).
It took me the entire time to identify the cause of this noise because the drive used to be installed in a system with multiple hard disks and fans that’s under heavy use, and the noise occurred very infrequently and randomly. No way to cause it, no way to predict it. It just happens every now and then. Sometimes the HDD is quite for days, sometimes the noise occurs every couple seconds. Sometimes minutes in between, sometimes hours. Completely unpredictable. And extremely annoying and also worrying.
Do you know what this is? Is it a known noise of WD Reds? Is it a support case? Is it as concerning as it sounds (despite being the same for almost 2 years now)?
I’m quite familiar with the noise that a hard drive should make. This particular noise is far from that. And it seems like it’s slowly getting worse. The frequency of occurrence appears to be increasing.
It’s the most annoying and unpleasant sound I’ve ever heard from a hard drive. If that’s normal, I’d say, WD, please gather your QA team and tell them to do their job properly! NAS drive or not, this is nothing you want to have to listen to in your rooms all day. It sounds like you were cutting wooden dowels on a table saw.
It seems like the noise only occurs when the hard drive is idling. During activity (scanning folders, writing files) it has not occurred yet. So it seems (!) like it’s somehow related to a parked head…
I’ll open a ticket, thanks for reaching out to me.
One thing though: I’ve already initiated a refund with Amazon where I bought the HDD a good one and a half years ago. They’ll refund it. So if you want to take a look yourself at the cause of the noise (which I would appreciate), you’ll have to either reach out to Amazon to get hold of it (I’ll add the serial number to the ticket so it’ll be at least possible to find it in Amazon’s warehouses). Alternatively, I can offer you the following deal: you refund me directly and take care of shipping, and I’ll stop the refunding with Amazon. That way you’d get the HDD for further inspection directly from me without searching the Amazon warehouses. What do you think?
@HWiese1980 what was the final result on this? Also, your soundcloud link is broken and I’m curious to hear if your sound is the same as this strange sound my WD Reds started making last week out of the blue…
(listen closely and you can hear it at about 4s, 10s and 14s in that video)
