Question Seagate Internal Hard Drive Making a Pulsing, Buzzing Sound

[DavidInWisconsin]

I have an old Dell Optiplex 7020 Tower PC that my brother gave me.

I recently set it up with 2 Seagate internal drives for storage.
The drives are mounted at the bottom of the case using the plastic clip carriages provided.

Ever since I started using this computer I've been hearing a consistent pulsing resonance coming from at least one of the hard drives.
It's a bit maddening!
Today I open the computer and discovered that the pulsing, resonant humming is coming from the box where the 2 internal storage drives are
installed, at the bottom of the case. I tried pushing them with my finger and they've now started to buzz along with the resonance.
I can stop the buzzing by pushing on the case but the pulsing resonance is still there.

I'm trying to figure out how to stop the buzzing and also the resonant pulsing.

Any thought, suggestions, ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Ralston18]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Include PSU, drives, and case information.

= = = =

By "box" do you mean the cage hosting the disk drives?

I suggest carefully tightening up the screws. Just in small increases.

Or tighten some and loosen others but do all such adjustments with power off and the system unplugged.

Maybe a small piece of rubber band as a shim/washer between cage and case.

Focus on screws closest to places you can touch when you can push the case and buzzing stops.

Also: take a couple of photographs showing case, cage(box), and drives.

Save the images to imgur (www.imgur.com) and post the link herein.

There may be other ideas and suggestions.

 

[DavidInWisconsin]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

Include PSU, drives, and case information.

= = = =

By "box" do you mean the cage hosting the disk drives?

I suggest carefully tightening up the screws. Just in small increases.

Or tighten some and loosen others but do all such adjustments with power off and the system unplugged.

Maybe a small piece of rubber band as a shim/washer between cage and case.

Focus on screws closest to places you can touch when you can push the case and buzzing stops.

Also: take a couple of photographs showing case, cage(box), and drives.

Save the images to imgur (www.imgur.com) and post the link herein.

There may be other ideas and suggestions.

Thank you for responding to my question Ralston18.

Yes, I meant the cage. It's at the bottom of the case. The drives are mounted on plastic and metal trays that slide in to the cage and snap in place.
It's stopped buzzing, at least for now but I'll follow your suggestions.

My main concern is the pulsing, resonant humming coming from one if the drives.
They are older drives so I don't know if it means that it's going bad.
The two in question are used for storage.
The resonant pulsing hum is constant. It's a slow swell that takes about 2 seconds to go from low volume to high volume and then it repeats constantly.

 

[Ralston18]

Always work with the idea that a drive is going bad.

Which means that you should always have all important data on that drive (actually all drives) backed up to another drive away from the current host computer. Verify that the backups are recoverable and readable.

As for the cited "pulsing, resonant humming coming from one if the drives", I am going to move this thread from Components to Storage.

Much more applicable category and very likely that someone following that category may be able to offer additional suggestions and ideas.

 

[DavidInWisconsin]

Always work with the idea that a drive is going bad.

Which means that you should always have all important data on that drive (actually all drives) backed up to another drive away from the current host computer. Verify that the backups are recoverable and readable.

As for the cited "pulsing, resonant humming coming from one if the drives", I am going to move this thread from Components to Storage.

Much more applicable category and very likely that someone following that category may be able to offer additional suggestions and ideas.

Thank you Ralston18