I have 2 different sets of WD Gold hard drives. The first set consists of 4 - 2TB drives and the 2nd set are 4 - 4TB drives. They were all new as of 11/16.
The 2TB drives are not in service right now. All of the drives are or were in a Dell T130 connected to a Dell PERC9 H330 Raid Controller.
So, here is the situation. The drive or drives (can’t tell which) clunk every 3 to 4 seconds. It is a quick disk access. It doesn’t sound like a mechanical issue at all. The drives pass both Dell’s PERC9 hardware diagnostics and WD’s Data Lifeguard diagnostics.
I am not really sure if this is normal or not given that both the 2TB drives and the 4TB drives both do it but I’m concerned about it.
I have seen other postings on the net that this issue may be related to some sort of power management setting but I am not sure where that setting would be. I checked the physical drive power management settings in the Bios and the settings are set to off. I checked Windows 2016 power management and the hard drive activity time out is set to never.
I have a couple of small 30 second videos that I took of the sound but I don’t know how to upload them. The editor where you create a post doesn’t support mov files.
I did run the Lifeguard tests several times over the course of 3 days and everything passes on the 4 - 2tb Gold drives I have as well as the 4 - 4tb WD Gold’s I bought just a few weeks ago and they passed. I ran Dell’s pre-OS diagnostics which runs from their PERC Raid controller as well and the drives (2 tb and 4 tb) passed those tests as well. One of the concerns I have about the WD Lifeguard is it doesn’t test the drives in a PERC raid array individually. It sees the raid array as one drive and hits all drives at one time and the WD product doesn’t give you SMART information either all it sees is the PERC raid controller. The Dell diags test each drive individually and reports results for each drive as well as SMART information and again the drives pass.
I also removed the drives from the raid configuration and tested them in the Dell and they pass but they still have the noise every 3 to 4 seconds. The noise sounds the same as a normal drive read or write but occurs every 3 to 4 seconds and it is a short burst.
One last thing I did was I put all of the drives in another server and there is not any blip coming out of them every 3 to 4 seconds.
I spoke to Dell earlier and they sent me a link to 2 new drivers for the PERC controller so I will try them but they said beyond that there is nothing else they can do which is really upsetting since they sell the same drives but they cost $80+ dollars more .
Anyway that’s the scoop and I will keep everyone informed.
I listen my and hear the same, may be once in 4-5 seconds, sometimes louder, sometimes quiet.
But also I have fast increased Unsafe shutdown and Load Cycle counters. Check yours please.
This occurs even I disable it in windows…
Thank you for the suggestion! I wish I knew how to do what you are describing. I did high end mini computer and server deployments for 28yrs but three years ago I had a major brain issue and I lost most if not all of my memory and I have a bunch of other issues related to that. I bought a Dell server because I deployed thousands of them all over the world but the technical stuff is all gone.
If you could let me know how you did what you did I would appreciate it. One thing to keep in mind, as my computer guy (a good friend) points out, is this issue occurs from power on to shutdown. As soon as the PERC drivers load, I think my friend said they are part of the Bios or UEFI system, the issue starts. You can see the drivers load during early startup and then bang, the sound starts. I wish I could figure out how to post a video of it. I sent a few to Dell Pro Support just so they could hear it.
I uploaded a .WAV file to my Public folder on Microsoft’s OneDrive website. If anyone wants to hear it the link is below. I don’t know if the link actually works or not though because when I click on the link it takes me there and logs me in.
Yes, the link is working. My hdd makes similar sounds, but may be more high frequency sounds (but i think it is recording your issue and we have same).
Can you check your drive’s s.m.a.r.t with program like HDtune?
Thank you for chiming in, I was just getting ready to pull that link down and change the location other than the one I am using because it doesn’t use a properly formatted URL.
Anyway I’m glad that someone did hear it before I change it.
Yes I did run it and drives are working from a performance standpoint but HDTune utility works just like WD’s Lifeguard product in that it only see’s the raid control it doesn’t see each drive individual and at the time I ran it I couldn’t breakdown the raid array to allow it to see each individual drive so the tests are really producing information usable information in regard to testing. The other issue withe the two utilities is kind of the same as above. The software see’s the raid controller not the drives so it can’t retrieve the SMART information.
So, that leaves me with one test vehicle until I can breakdown the raid configuration and that is the pre-OS diagnostic utility that is built into the Dell servers. It will run individual tests on each drive and report out SMART information but I have no idea what that information means.
I am waiting for calls back from both Dell and Western Digital. They people I’ve contacted are a little further up the chain.
I am continuing to search for documentation stating that ‘only our hard drives can be used’ but so far there none. What have found is in the T130 owners manual as well as the PERC 9 series manual and the statement in those are ‘enterprise class drives are required for raid there is no restriction for non-raid drives’.
I am at a lose with all of this.
I have two calls into manufactures about alternative raid card options one of which is LSI. The PERC 9 H330 raid controller uses a LSI raid chipset.
