Question HDD making strange vibrations.

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J

JerT

Apr 5, 2020
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4
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HDD: WD Gold Enterprise Class 4 TB (Doesnt have OS installed on it just games etc)

Right so few hrs ago i noticed it but like every 10-30 seconds my HDD makes a "punchy" vibration that i can feel on my arm when im resting my arm on my tables mousepad (PC is about 1 meter off my mouse pad) while just doing normal minimal load stuff (chrome,spotify,steam open).

Its mounted below the PSU shroud in a tray with washers and screws but i did tighten them quite a bit (as much as they went in without excessive force). (i also monitored read/writes on that drive with hwinfo64 and set sensor update interval to 1ms, i didnt observe any read/write actions being performed as i felt the vibration but then again i dont know does hwinfo64 catch everything.

There isnt a constant vibration like some pcs have but just the weird case mentioned above.

Any thoughts to what it could be cause by? do i need to be worried or anything?

If its the screws being too tight can i leave it overnight with potential heavy read/writes for the HDD (need to work and borrowed my toolpack for a friend to help with his moving, so dont have anything to loosen the screws atm).

Thanks in advance.
 
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COLGeek said:
This sensation/sound is common with some HDDs. Yours may, in fact, be one of them. I have a different WD (Black 4TB) that does the same and there are many folks not happy with this issue.

I suspect your HDD is fine, just annoying.
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I see well would you recommend me loosening the screws a tad bit or just leaves as is? If there will be any issues later on caused by this would they show up on hwinfo64/windows disk managment or would i just have to get crystal disk info look up on them?

And do you have any idea what exactly causes this? cant be age related because its brand new.
 
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Many drives make noise when accessed...some, much more than others, and, 7200 rpm drives usually make more than 5400 rpm drives....

I thought my HGST 7200 rpm 4 TB drive was reasonably quiet, ...until I did a GsmrtControl short test...; then you can hear it above all other fans, etc., during intensive writes/reads of multiple gigabytes. :)
 
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mdd1963 said:
Many drives make noise when accessed...some, much more than others, and, 7200 rpm drives usually make more than 5400 rpm drives....

I thought my HGST 7200 rpm 4 TB drive was reasonably quiet, ...until I did a GsmrtControl short test...; then you can hear it above all other fans, etc., during intensive writes/reads of multiple gigabytes. :)
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Yes but like i said the drive can be in what i would call a "zero state" where its not doing anything atleast according to hwinfo64 statistics and its not a constant noise or vibration its just a momentary vibration i can feel similar to if i would tap my finger at the other end of the table.
 
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Just contacted WD support via their support service asked about this and lets just say it was intresting...

The guy seemed to not even have any idea what i was talking about he was like "Yeah yeah its platter it will vibrate" even thought when i explained exactly what kind of vibration it was and then he said "This shouldnt happen with WD Gold" and the proceeded to say "Its all normal" at the end of the chat. Like wow im just honestly wondering if they guy was drinking on the job or what but now im honestly confused that is it okay or not 😀
 
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To me, your description sounds like the head parking. it won't park long usually, windows is always doing something in the background... but that's the noise, vibration it makes, just like a finger tap.

You can try going into the Advanced power setting and setting the drives to never turn off but keep in mind some drives firmware will ignore the setting.
 
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popatim said:
To me, your description sounds like the head parking. it won't park long usually, windows is always doing something in the background... but that's the noise, vibration it makes, just like a finger tap.

You can try going into the Advanced power setting and setting the drives to never turn off but keep in mind some drives firmware will ignore the setting.
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There is literally nothing in the drive that windows would need to access for its operations, it just has games and like i said before hwinfo64 didnt record ANY activity during these "fingertap vibrations".
 
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As mentioned earlier, I have a WD Black 4TB that makes a random noise. It is somewhat distracting and perfectly normal for that HDD (MANY others have the same issue). I would not be surprised if there are common components used by both HDD variants/models.
 
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COLGeek said:
As mentioned earlier, I have a WD Black 4TB that makes a random noise. It is somewhat distracting and perfectly normal for that HDD (MANY others have the same issue). I would not be surprised if there are common components used by both HDD variants/models.
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Not a noise just a vibration, but yeah anyways ill post here if there is something wrong with it after all.
 
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popatim said:
Windows is always doing something. Superfetch, drive indexing, background defrag, ...
Run Resource Monitor and switch the the disk section.
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Okay but wouldnt this activity show up on the monitoring softwares mentioned? update interval is set to 500ms on hwinfo64 thats more than enough time to catch it.
 
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