Hard Drive Sound Profiles and Aging?

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

I wanted to get your opinion on this.

My desktop had been SSD only since early 2010 or so, with all my storage going on my NAS.

Recently I upgraded a bunch of drives in my NAS, and had a couple of spare WD Green 3TB drives.

I figured I'd pop them in my desktop, and run a two disk mirror to store some backups and things I cant put on my NAS (Like an OS disk image of my NAS drive, for instance).

This worked out well, but at the same time I've also been working on reducing the noise level of my desktop by using larger radiators, smaller fans, etc, and getting the airflow by using many low rpm 140mm fans, instead of fewer higher RPM 120mm fans.

Last night I one by one turned off all my fans temporarily to figure out where my remaining noise is coming from, and to my surprise it's coming from the two WD Green drives.

I say surprise, not because I am surprised that hard drives make noise (this is not my first rodeo, and I remember when HD's were LOUD), but rather because I remember being astonished at how quiet these Green drives were when I first got them some 5 years ago. I vaguely remember powering them up on my bench top during install and having to put my ear on them to hear them at all. The noise I am troubled by is not the seek noise as they do work, but rather the regular spinning of the disks.

These WD Greens have led hard lives though, so it doesn't surprise me. They've been on 24/7 for 5 years in a NAS work environment they weren't designed for, most of those with the IntelliPark option still enabled, so they have some 300,000+ head parks at this point, so it doesn't surprise me that they might be having issues at this point.

Anyway, so I guess my questions are as follows:

• Is it typical for hard drives to get louder as they age? You know, bearing/spinning noise, not head/seek noise. I'm trying to figure out if I am going crazy, currently have increased noise sensitivity, or if this issue is actually a real physical phenomenon.
  
  
• So, would I thus be able to get much quieter operation with newer drives?
  
  
• From a noise perspective, would it make more sense to go with 2.5" laptop drives? I know back in the day when hard drives were LOUD, laptop drives weren't, but I get the impression even desktop 3.5" drives are fairly quiet these days. Are 5,400rpm drives much quieter than 7,200rpm drives these days?
  
  
• What route would you go for this purpose? I'm looking for either two drives for a mirror, or three drives for a RAID5 like setup (yes, I know RAID5 is no longer state of the art, but this contains only moderately important data). In the case of a mirror, I'd need at least two 1.5TB drives. In the case of a 3 disk RAID5 setup, I could probably get away with three 750GB drives. Emphasis is on budget friendliness and noise levels, not on performance. Honestly don't care if they are slow as snails.

The thing is, while I am no stranger to hard drives (I've been running a NAS since before it became a popular thing to do at home, and I currently have a 12 disk 48TB ZFS Raid 60 equivalent setup in the basement) all of my recent experience has been for server builds, so I haven't necessarily paid much attention to things like noise.

Microcenter has 7,200 RPM 3.5" WD Blue 1TB drives for $39.99. They are 7,200rpm, which makes me concerned they might be loud, but if they aren't they seem like a fantastic deal and good application here.

I appreciate any input you guys might have.

 

[drescherjm]

currently have increased noise sensitivity

I would bet on this.

 

[Quix]

I would bet on this.

I find I've developed this problem ever since I chopped the sound level of my PC's fans in half. I can now hear everything the hard drives are doing. I still have 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.7s I bought in 2007 (I think) and at this point they're the loudest thing in my PC by far.

Additionally I've got 4 WD Greens in my NAS and they're not silent when spinning. They make a high-pitched whooshing noise when spinning.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I find I've developed this problem ever since I chopped the sound level of my PC's fans in half. I can now hear everything the hard drives are doing. I still have 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.7s I bought in 2007 (I think) and at this point they're the loudest thing in my PC by far.

Additionally I've got 4 WD Greens in my NAS and they're not silent when spinning. They make a high-pitched whooshing noise when spinning.

Hmm.

Maybe it's a combination of poor memory, and newer drives being quieter then.

I used one of those 1TB WD blues above in my stepsons build last year, and I recall it being damned near silent when I built it (but now I am questioning this memory too)

I should just pull out a bunch of drives and give them a bench top ear test (sadly I do not posses a loudness meter.)

 

[Ocellaris]

Hmm.

Maybe it's a combination of poor memory, and newer drives being quieter then.

Also ambient noise, sound dampening in the room, and/or different hardware in the case can have an effect on how audible a drive is. If I had a drive that went from inaudible to audible with nothing changing, I would be looking to replace the drive. The last few times I've heard abnormal noises from a HDD, they died shortly after.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Also ambient noise, sound dampening in the room, and/or different hardware in the case can have an effect on how audible a drive is.

Good points. At the same time as I installed my new fans, fan controller and all that, I also moved the drives from the corsair mount in the bottom of the case to an IcyDock Fatcage 3 bay backplane installed in the 5.25" bays.

I wonder if that is contributing to my issues. Could it be that the dock has poor acoustic properties? It does come with an 80mm fan, but I ahve that turned all the way down using my fan controller

If I had a drive that went from inaudible to audible with nothing changing, I would be looking to replace the drive. The last few times I've heard abnormal noises from a HDD, they died shortly after.

Well yeah, and I know I have abused these drives over a long time, so if they die it wouldn't surprise me. (in fact three other drives of this vintage used in the same system over the same amount of time, have already failed)

I run these as mirrors though, so if one goes, it's not the end of the world.

I mostly use them as a backup source for the drive images of my server, since, if my server goes down, my normal backup location (my NAS) won't exactly be accessible

Thing is, if one of them fails I can rebuild the set from the other. If both of them fail, I can copy the backup from the server again. The only time id' have a problem is if both drives failed, AND my server went down at the same time, which seems a rather remote possibility, and even if that happens, I can always reinstall the OS drive again, it would just be a little bit of a pain to have to set everything up the way I like it again.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

So I pulled the drives out and compared them to some newer drives I have.

In an extremely unscientific comparison, they were very similar in noise level.

It was late at night, the house was quiet and my computer is much quieter now than it used to be, so I am guessing I was just particularly noise sensitive at the time.

There is no winning with computer noise levels I guess. Once you make it what used to be inaudible, your hearing adjusts, and now you can hear it again