[SOLVED] Seagate Barracuda weird sounds

[bubyy_tomshardware]

Hello.

I bought a Seagate ST2000DM008 2TB drive today.
I hooked it up and cloned all data from my old hard drive. It didn't make any weird noise.
When the cloning process finished, I removed my old hard drive since it is 7 years old.
When the PC first booted with the new drive, there was no sound. However, when reading/writing it makes low pitch clicking noises. This was happening on my old hard drive too, which is also a Seagate, but I never had problems with it for 7 years.
The second time I booted the PC, the hard drive made a beeping-like noise. Not like usual beeping but like a screech, idk how to explain. I haven't dropped it or anything. It's brand new. Works fine as well. Hard Disk Sentinel says it has 100% health.

Should I maybe try to plug in the old hard drive and see the outcome? I also plugged the SATA cable of the new drive where the old drive was plugged in. Should I try other SATA connectors?

Thanks

 

[bubyy_tomshardware]

Here's a better recording of the sound.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Seagate's ST2000DM008 model hard disk has 1 platter and 2 heads, making it a 2 TB platter, which is pretty dense in terms of data per platter.

To achieve that sort of density, it's almost a guarantee you've ended up with an SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) style hard drive.

These types of drives are not usually recommended for anything more than moderate random access workloads and archive storage. They are more of a write infrequently but access often type of device. There's nothing inherently wrong with SMR drives, as long as you respect their behavior characteristics, and for the same storage space using non-shingled methods, you likely would be looking at a higher cost.

The drive sounds perfectly fine and normal for what it is. When copying data to an SMR drive, the drive will perform writes to it's non-shingled buffer tracks, which generally performs as fast as any other hard drive. During idle time, when the drive is otherwise not busy, or on the occasion you write more data to the drive than fits in the non-shingled buffer area, the read / write heads keep busy committing buffered data to the shingled segments of the drive. Writing to the shingled areas is much slower because adjacent tracks must be rewritten, increasing the actual data being handled internally to keep things in order. Once you bump up against the buffer limits of the drive during a write operation, you can expect some seemingly weird performance, from 2 - 40 MB/s intermittently.

Once the drive sits idle for some time after data has been written to it, I suspect it will be as quiet as any other hard drive you've used.

Another thing folks neglect is, SMR drives have a logical to physical mapping of sectors much like that of an SSD. What the OS sees is not what the drive sees, but only what the drive is telling the OS to see due to it's clever translation layer. Defragmenting an SMR drive is about as useful as defragmenting an SSD in terms of putting files in particular places on the drive, and is likely to take a very long time to complete if the drive has any significant amount of fragmentation. For the extra wear on the drive, you get little return in terms of speed. While defragmentation software may think it's putting data in a particular place on the disk, it's actually only defragmenting the translation table and file metadata, while the underlying storage controller on the drive decides where the actual data gets mapped to physically. So, ideally, defragment once in a while to prevent hitting the maximum fragments your drive's metadata can handle and to regain a tiny bit of speed from having to handle excess metadata for excessively fragmented files, but otherwise don't worry about it.

 

[bubyy_tomshardware]

Thank You!