WD30EFRX - Loud and clunky noises

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hey guys,

I bought 3 Western Digital Red 3TB (WD30EFRX) drives the other day and installed them in my NAS servers.

Here’s my current setup:
2x WD30EFRX in RAID 1 in a Synology DS215
1x WD30EFRX in a Synlogy DS115j (serves as backup target for the DS214)

All three drives are extremely noisy. It’s a clunky sound that occurs every 5 seconds (or so) when data is being written to or pulled from the HDD.

I found two matching sound samples online:

I can hear the noise through my noise-cancelling headphones and the NASes are ~5 meters away.

I already ran extended SMART tests, the WD diagnostics software and checked for firmware upgrades (n/a).

My old WD Red 1 TB drives where dead-silent and I never noticed them.

Do you think I should return the three 3TB drives?

2

Perhaps it would be best to contact WD Support about this. You can do so over the phone or via E-mail.

3

Brand new 18TB My Book had same 5 sec. interval clunking noise right out of the box. Sounded like a drive just before it fails. Never experienced this before with brand new WD MyBook. Any suggestion for alternative to WD, or is Seagate the only game in town?