Is it normal for my HDD to be louder than my fans ?

Yetyhunter · May 2, 2018

I just built my new PC and I was hopping to have it inaudible when idle or when i'm simply browsing or watching a movie. I spent allot of time tweaking my fans and I managed to silence them completely but there is a noise louder than everything else. I pinpointed the source of the noise at my SEAGATE Firecuda 2TB drive.

The drive is simply spinning, nothing is being written on it. It's not a clicking/grinding noise. I took it in my hand while it was running and I could feel it spinning very fast making some kind of shhh constant noise and vibration.

Is this normal for it to make this kind of noise, louder than my fans ? Should it always be spinning ?

Any help is appreciated.

Kleer Kut · May 2, 2018

Yes and yes. It's a 7200 RPM drive with multiple platters. It's hard to gauge with a high degree of accuracy without knowing what fans, case, and what speed the fans are running. If you purposely built it to be quiet then I'm guessing the fans are very quiet to the point that the loudest component is now the hard drive.

Does it drone and sound louder if it is in the case vs holding it like you mentioned? If there isn't anything built in to the case to dampen vibration then large case panels can cause it to amplify the sound. Depending on which case you have you may have options to install something to dampen vibrations, or might have to go the DIY route.

If it isn't causing any major vibrations and you just wanted a dead silent PC, then getting a 7200 RPM drive was always going to be the loudest part of your build. They spin and vibrate and make noise. There are probably settings you can adjust so the drive spins down sooner when idle.

Yetyhunter · May 2, 2018

Kleer Kut said:
Yes and yes. It's a 7200 RPM drive with multiple platters. It's hard to gauge with a high degree of accuracy without knowing what fans, case, and what speed the fans are running. If you purposely built it to be quiet then I'm guessing the fans are very quiet to the point that the loudest component is now the hard drive.

Does it drone and sound louder if it is in the case vs holding it like you mentioned? If there isn't anything built in to the case to dampen vibration then large case panels can cause it to amplify the sound. Depending on which case you have you may have options to install something to dampen vibrations, or might have to go the DIY route.

If it isn't causing any major vibrations and you just wanted a dead silent PC, then getting a 7200 RPM drive was always going to be the loudest part of your build. They spin and vibrate and make noise. There are probably settings you can adjust so the drive spins down sooner when idle.

I have the components in my signature. The Meshify C with 3 Phanteks 140mm fans running at about 500rpm in idle mode, dead silent. I did adjust the power plan settings for the hard drive to turn off after 7 minutes. The problem with the windows settings it's it doesn't say which HDD it turns off. My OS is on my SSD which is active most of the time and won't allow to be turned off.If it were possible to differentiate the two.

Blameless · May 2, 2018

Some drives are essentially silent when their heads are parked even while spinning, others have quite a bit of vibration from just the spindle motor. My older Seagates and my HGST drives have essentially no vibration, but my Samsung and WD drives are quite audible.

You could try suspending the drive via something that won't transmit vibration to the case..

Yetyhunter · May 2, 2018

Blameless said:
Some drives are essentially silent when their heads are parked even while spinning, others have quite a bit of vibration from just the spindle motor. My older Seagates and my HGST drives have essentially no vibration, but my Samsung and WD drives are quite audible.

You could try suspending the drive via something that won't transmit vibration to the case..

It's more the noise that it makes from within the hard drive, since I took it out while it was running and held it in my hand at it was still loud. It sits on rubber washers in the case.

MNMadman · May 2, 2018

Yetyhunter said:
I have the components in my signature. The Meshify C with 3 Phanteks 140mm fans running at about 500rpm in idle mode, dead silent. I did adjust the power plan settings for the hard drive to turn off after 7 minutes. The problem with the windows settings it's it doesn't say which HDD it turns off. My OS is on my SSD which is active most of the time and won't allow to be turned off.If it were possible to differentiate the two.

There is no way to turn off an SSD. Windows should automatically turn off whichever drives it can, which means only the FireCuda.

And if the noise is just from the platters spinning, there is nothing you can do about it on most drives. There might be a setting in the firmware that can make the drive spin at 5400 RPM (activated by the software that came with the drive if retail), but that defeats the purpose of getting a fast drive in the first place.

I've never had a drive that was noisy just spinning. During read and write operations, yes.

Blameless · May 2, 2018

Yetyhunter said:
It's more the noise that it makes from within the hard drive, since I took it out while it was running and held it in my hand at it was still loud. It sits on rubber washers in the case.

Drive could well be defective, though I don't have any of that model to compare it to.

MNMadman said:
There is no way to turn off an SSD.

Most SSDs have several power states, and the deep idle states are at least as 'off' as any mechanical drive that's still plugged in can be.

Gilles3000 · May 2, 2018

Nothing you can do about it really, pretty much all high capacity drives are (relatively) loud.

If you want a quiet system you'll need to move your HDD('s) elsewhere, wehere it can't be heard.
A NAS/Fileserver/raidbox(with a really long cable)/etc, can be used for this.

Yetyhunter · May 3, 2018

Well thank you all for the clarifications. Guess i'll have to learn how to live with it. But i will look into that 5400rpm thing. That's actually a verry good ideea. I'll gave to to a performance comparison if I manage to switch to the inferior speed.

kallamamran · May 5, 2019

Same "problem"?

Hi there,

I have the very same problem, but with a 8TB Seagate Ironwolf. I have 6 fans in my case + CPU fan and a 2080 Ti and the HDD spinning is still the loudest part when not stressing the computer.
It's such a bummer when "sidegrading" from a computer with dead silent 2x4TB (WDC RED + Barracuda) to 1x8TB (Ironwolf) to get some more room in the computer and the 8TB disk is just horribly loud, by my standards that is.

Don't know what to do... Just know I can't have it this way. It's NOT OK!!!

Gilles3000 · May 5, 2019

kallamamran said:
Hi there,

I have the very same problem, but with a 8TB Seagate Ironwolf. I have 6 fans in my case + CPU fan and a 2080 Ti and the HDD spinning is still the loudest part when not stressing the computer.
It's such a bummer when "sidegrading" from a computer with dead silent 2x4TB (WDC RED + Barracuda) to 1x8TB (Ironwolf) to get some more room in the computer and the 8TB disk is just horribly loud, by my standards that is.

Don't know what to do... Just know I can't have it this way. It's NOT OK!!!

Unfortunately its just normal, the higher density drives you get the louder they seem to become. For example the WD Red 4TB's are also much louder than most single platter 1TB drives.

The only thing you can really do about it is to only run ssd storage in your case, and put your high capacity HDD's in a NAS or raidbox in a different room.

Yetyhunter · May 7, 2019

I got used to it. The only thing I could do is to set the HDD to turn off if idle for more than 10 minutes. I only have games on it, so when I browse or watch a movie it's off and I don't hear it. As soon I I launch a game I immediately hear it it starting to spin.

Fluxmaven · May 7, 2019

My main PC sits right by me on my desk and has a custom loop. It's nice an quiet running off the SSD, but my games are on a HDD, so once it spins up, it's the most audible thing. About to build a new PC and am going for SSD only this time. I have been adding storage to my HTPC in another room and will use it as a file server. So it should be pretty painless transitioning to a bit less storage in my main PC.

Xanatos · May 13, 2019

Yes, on my laptops and HTPC, the HDDs were the loudest things running. I didn't figure this out until I swapped a HDD for a SSD on one of the laptops. I always thought it was the fans making the humming noise.

Is it normal for my HDD to be louder than my fans ?

Yetyhunter

Kleer Kut

Yetyhunter

Blameless

Yetyhunter

MNMadman

Blameless

Gilles3000

Yetyhunter

kallamamran

Gilles3000

Yetyhunter

Fluxmaven

Xanatos

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