WD20EARX (Green 2TB) + Seagate HD = Noisy Tickle (Tsk Tsk Tsk)

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello,

I had a WD20EARX (Green 2TB) + Seagate Green HD 1.5TB in my PC, and the WD was producing a very annoying tickle sound, something like a tsk tsk tsk a few seconds after each access to the HD.

I tried the WDIDLE3.EXE stuff, but it didn’t help a bit.

Monitoring the temperature (with HWMonitor) and doing nothing else on the drive was giving the tsk tsk tsk every 8 or 9 seconds non-stop.

Constant access (example: a large copy of files) wasn’t producing any bad sound, or any hearable sound at all for that matter.

I have 2 WD20EARX, and the 2nd one was in a USB Box and didn’t produce any noise, so I thought I’d swap them. To do so, I removed my Seagate HD, plugged the 2nd WD to copy everything from 1st one to it, and booted Windows ; and there, to my big surprise, the 1st WD wasn’t producing any more tickling…!

My Seagate drive is used mainly for backup, so most of time, it’s just turned off by the power saving feature of Windows, so even though it was inactive & basically turned off, it was enough to put the WD drive in a bad state.

So now, I have my Seagate in the USB Box & both the WD drives in my PC and all is fine (since 2 or 3 weeks)…!

1 little more info : I also have a 3rd drive ; in the past, it was a Seagate 500GB, and I didn’t have any tickling sound ; it’s only when the Seagate died a few months ago, and that I had replaced it by a WD Blue 500GB that I started to hear the annoying sound ; at that time I had another WD20EARX, but I was sure the noise was coming from the Blue drive. It’s not before the WD20EARX shown some defective sectors that I thought it was the faulty one. I then bought a new WD20EARX & also exchanged the defective one through garantee.

So to resume all that :

  1. Seagate .ES 500GB + WD Green 2TB + Seagate Green 1.5TB = no tickling noise

  2. WD Blue 500GB + WD Green 2TB + Seagate Green 1.5TB = bad tickling noise

  3. WD Blue 500GB + 2nd WD Green 2TB + Seagate Green 1.5TB = bad tickling noise

  4. WD Blue 500GB + 2nd WD Green 2TB + 3rd WD Green Green 2TB  = no tickling noise

Mobo : Asus Maximus Formula

OS : Windows 7 x64

Hopefully this info will be helpful to someone else. This problem drove me crazy for weeks and I couldn’t find any info to solve it.

2

A really weird issue the one you had, thanks for sharing it.