Do any of you have a Seagate Ironwolf HDD? I just have a quick question.

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Gatecrasher3000

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I bought a Seagate Ironwolf HDD for the first time last month to use in my media server. I usually buy WD Red, and have had good luck with them but I thought I would give a Ironwolf a try. My god, the sound of scrubbing coming from the Ironwolf is crazy loud, I can't even hear my WD Red but the Ironwolf sounds like a mainframe from 1985.
Are they supposed to be this loud?? I find it difficult to believe there is nothing wrong with this drive if it is making this sounds but so far it is working fine.
Anyone else have this issue with their Ironwolf?
 
I got 2 x 3TB Ironwolf's in a QNAP but never noticed them being that loud, they were certainly near silent compared to the HGST drivers I had before in it.
 
I've used Ironwolf's for NAS's in the past, nottaproblemo and never noticed any excessive noise(s) from them...

I would recommend RMA'ing it asap, as it seems like you got a bad one...
 
I use 4 ironwolf pro's in raid 5 on shitty intel rst. There is some obvious grating noise when spinning up and going to sleep, right now my case is open. Ya they make some noise but that's the nature of spinners. They do make computer cases with noise suppression. Check the smart tables, if they are fine likely nothing wrong with your drive. I used WD enterprise drives for a long time but last few years newer drives have seen failures, after research i chose the ironwolf pro's.
 
I have two Ironwolf drives, a 6TB and 8TB, and neither one of them is even remotely loud. I could be doing a torture test of reads and writes on them and still couldn't hear them from a closed case with fans.

The problem with threads like this is you can never tell what someone considers "loud" as it's completely subjective. I haven't had a "loud" consumer or NAS drive since the mid 2000s with 160GB-500GB drives. This includes Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba drives. For me to hear the modern Ironwolf drives would require a completely silent system with a side panel off in a completely silent room. It's mostly the same for the Toshiba NAS drive except it is a tiny bit louder than the Ironwolf drives.

As an example, I had an ancient WD 500GB drive I was using as a boot drive and when it was in use such as with OS updates or building a Plex or Jellyfin library you could easily hear that thing outside the closed case and the case fans. However, that was the exception as any of the other drives I had from that time period were nowhere near as loud as that thing was.
 
SmokeRngs said:
I have two Ironwolf drives, a 6TB and 8TB, and neither one of them is even remotely loud. I could be doing a torture test of reads and writes on them and still couldn't hear them from a closed case with fans.

The problem with threads like this is you can never tell what someone considers "loud" as it's completely subjective. I haven't had a "loud" consumer or NAS drive since the mid 2000s with 160GB-500GB drives. This includes Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba drives. For me to hear the modern Ironwolf drives would require a completely silent system with a side panel off in a completely silent room. It's mostly the same for the Toshiba NAS drive except it is a tiny bit louder than the Ironwolf drives.

As an example, I had an ancient WD 500GB drive I was using as a boot drive and when it was in use such as with OS updates or building a Plex or Jellyfin library you could easily hear that thing outside the closed case and the case fans. However, that was the exception as any of the other drives I had from that time period were nowhere near as loud as that thing was.
Click to expand...
Basically, it's half as loud as a dot matrix printer....
 
The real answer is...it depends.

Seagate (like WD) has changed their drives in the series. I think the newer drives are closer to the Exos series, which are a true enterprise drive and will have noises due to being a solid drive and having solid parts. (Desktop drives are silent but weak sauce in terms of relibility and longevity.)

Basically, a good solid drive will be making noise whether it is an HGST, Seagate, WD, or Toshiba (I have all of these), and the noise for these drives is the same. Consumer drives won't have noise because manufacturers have figured out they can make a far less reliable drive and it will sell to a certain demographic that is concerned about noise. These used to be the 'nas' drives that were initially desktop drives with a different firmware that adjusted the timeout for better raid compatibility, but as this segment of the market has grown, the quality of the drive has increased to the point is was starting to undercut the real enterprise drive sales. So then again a division was made (Ironwolf Pro vs Ironwolf, WD Red vs Red Pro) where the 'lesser' drives are more like their desktop cousins (quiet and less reliable and less warranty), and the 'Pro' series are almost like their enterprise counterparts (and pretty much just as expensive).

So all of this being said, a modern Ironwolf Pro will be more like a Seagate Exos which is about performance and reliability--sound is not a design concern. And I've noticed that even the Ironwolf regular models share the same build as their Pro brother, with just a lesser warranty.

You may find that if you were to swap it with a newer Red, that the Red will have the same sound profile. So if you really want silent quiet, stick a desktop drive in there. But just make sure you have a good backup somewhere on a reliable drive.

Personally, I don't care about sound and only about performance and reliability. I even set all my nas and computer fans to 100%.

Hope this helps shed some light.
 
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