HDD Whining sound

[verony2806]

Hello, since of the beggining of my PC build ( june 2018 ), my hard drive tends to make some weird whining noises every few hours or so. The whining noises come directly from the HDD and usually take about 5-6 seconds. During this "state", every frolder or windows explorer opened on my HDD freezes. Not my windows though, which is located on my SSD. The sound is exactly like a plane engine starting up or turbine if you would. Some people say that it is a PSU issue, which is in my opinion absolutely illogical and incorrect. To put up a better example, if i leave my PC idle for an hour or so, when i come back and open anything related to the HDD, the whining sounds comes for a few seconds, resulting in the freezing of the windows explorer window. Not a big problem though, ive already got used to it. If someone competent can help me out it would be greatly appreciated.

SPECS: evga 750 gq 80+ gold, i7 8700k 1080ti 16 ram, samsung 960 evo, 3tb barracuda HDD

 

[Solandri]

The sound is exactly like a plane engine starting up or turbine if you would.

Your hard drive is going to sleep after x minutes of inactivity. It's spinning down the platter to save power. The plane engine startup whine sound is the drive powering up and spinning up the platter to speed again. The drive cannot handle read/write requests until it's up to full speed, so things like Windows explorer will freeze while waiting for the drive. If you have a pagefile on the drive and it's a pagefile access which is causing the drive to spin up, your entire computer would freeze during this time - even the mouse cursor.

The usual reason to spin down the drive is to save power (like on a laptop). Sometimes people do it to reduce the noise of the drives coming from their PC (like if you have a rarely-used second or third drive used to hold movies or backups). If you don't need the drive to spin down, you can turn the behavior off.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/prevent-hard-drive-going-sleep-windows

 

[verony2806]

Thank you very much! Suspected that something similar caused the sound, logically. Take care