The clicking from the two WD60EFZX drives in RAID 1 is not normal for idle drives, even though SMART reports show no issues and the drives have low power-on hours. The sound is likely caused by head parking, NAS background activity, or firmware behavior. To address it, the head park timer can be adjusted using tools like wdidle3, NAS power management and background tasks can be checked and optimized, firmware can be updated, or sound-dampening solutions can be used if noise is the main concern. The drives appear healthy, but monitoring them and reducing the clicks will make them easier to coexist with in the office and prevent potential long-term stress.
Yep, that’s pretty normal with WD Red drives, especially in a NAS and especially in RAID 1.
That “click/thump” every few seconds is usually the drive doing head parking/unparking or a background scan (NAS OS health checks, RAID sync checks, indexing, SMART polls, etc). Since the NAS is constantly touching the disks, it never really becomes “idle”, so it won’t go into sleep like you expect.
What you can do:
Check your NAS task schedule (scrub, RAID sync, indexing, media scan) and reduce how often it runs
Disable aggressive power saving / HDD hibernation (it can actually make the clicking worse)
Make sure the NAS firmware is updated
If the noise is driving you crazy, try rubber grommets / vibration dampening or move the NAS further away
If SMART is clean and no reallocated/pending sectors, it’s annoying but not a failure sign.
I have seen this with WD Red drives in NAS setups. Even when it looks idle, the system keeps poking the disks with tiny background tasks, so they never really sleep. If SMART is fine and the sound is regular, I would not worry too much.
