[SOLVED] Loud Hard Drives?

[Oasis Curator]

I've had some 2013 WD Green 2TB HDD for ages and they're pretty quiet when doing anything.

I tried some Seagate 16TB IronWolf, which were both hugely loud. Swapped to a Seagate 6TB Compute which was quieter but still a bit loud.
Now moved on to a 16TB WD White drive and although it's quiet-ish, there's still a notable click when playing a long film or something.

Is it just that the bigger the capacity, the louder the hard drive is going to be?

I don't want to bother getting yet another one just to find it's the same.

 

[kerberos_20]

harrdrives have moving parts, which creates vibrations, they are barely audible, but due to mounting mechanisms to a PC case, which is mostly some kind of metal, PC case happily receives those small vibrations and sends them throughout whole case, making those tiny vibrations much more audible
to fight with this, use rubber/plastic mounting mechanism, those will reduce hdd vibrations heard from your PC case

 

[ex_bubblehead]

As said above, mechanical drives have moving parts and moving parts make sound. The IronWolf drives are not intended for desktop use but rather are intended for places like server rooms where noise isn't an issue. Even using isolated mounts will still leave some transmission to the chassis/case. If you want dead silent then SSD is the only solution.

 

[Nighthawk117]

I've had some 2013 WD Green 2TB HDD for ages and they're pretty quiet when doing anything.

I tried some Seagate 16TB IronWolf, which were both hugely loud. Swapped to a Seagate 6TB Compute which was quieter but still a bit loud.
Now moved on to a 16TB WD White drive and although it's quiet-ish, there's still a notable click when playing a long film or something.

Is it just that the bigger the capacity, the louder the hard drive is going to be?

I don't want to bother getting yet another one just to find it's the same.

Faster spindle speeds and more platters make a drive nosier. 16TB and 7200rpm, yeah not surprised that's not silent. The WD Greens and 5400 RPM Blue's are pretty quiet, so is the Seagate Barracuda.

 

[mikeebb]

Modern hard drives are usually pretty quiet. Certainly by the standards of Conners of the 1990s (think fire siren). But yes, they do make noise, and as noted in other comments drives intended for server use are likely to be louder than those intended for consumer/home use. Probably have more capacity, and be better-performing and more durable too, but you may have to accept industrial noise levels for that.

 

[mdd1963]

more platters = more noise, particularly during access....

(Alas, 've never seen any formal noise comparison tests during read/write access between drives, which might be interesting to some folks!)

 

[Oasis Curator]

Okay, thank you all