Grinding Noises From a Brand New NAS HDD

Baz Lafr · July 5, 2020

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum and I'd like to preface this by saying that my tech knowledge is probably intermediate, as opposed to advanced, so I was hoping to get some opinions from folks more experienced with HDDs than I am.

I'm really unsure and frustrated at the moment and you'll soon understand why. I've had a pretty wonky storage solution for a while now involving multiple external hard drives connected via USB 3.0, and some weeks ago I found that my newest drive of them all, an 8TB WD My Book, had started making grinding noises during writes. It can't be more than a year and a half old. This was the last straw that pushed me to invest in a cleaner, more organised storage solution: an 8-bay hard drive enclosure in a JBOD configuration. My first purchase for the enclosure was a Seagate Ironwolf 10TB NAS HDD, which is designed for that kind of application. I set up the enclosure with the brand new 10TB HDD and started transferring files to it from my 8TB WD external, my intention being to get the files over to the new drive before the older grinding one possibly fails. While everything seemed to be transferring fine, I could hear a new grinding sound. It was coming from my hard drive enclosure; my brand new 10TB Seagate NAS drive. I recorded the sound of the drive making the 'grinding noise' (as I describe it) with my microphone and I'd like you guys to tell me if I'm right in believing this to be an unusual and worrisome sound for a HDD to be making, particularly when it's brand new, or if I'm mistaken and this is actually a normal sound for a HDD to make under load when performing writes. If it helps, I was transferring a folder with 70GB worth of image files to the drive while I was recording this.

Frustratingly, I couldn't get the older WD drive to make a grinding noise to compare, but the grinding noise I'm talking about with the Seagate drive is distinctly different to the WD's noises and was clearly coming from the hard drive enclosure. You can also hear the sound echoing a little inside the enclosure in the recording. The enclosure is an Icybox IB-3680 and I'm positive that the noises aren't from the enclosure itself, as they clearly coincide with the activity of the drive inside it. I've noticed that with the WD drive, it's only made those noises during torrent transfers, whereas this new drive (as previously mentioned) seems to do it even when transferring an images folder to it.

In conclusion, I'm willing to put up with annoying noises like these if this is normal for HDDs. My senior concern here is the reliability of the drive when it's making such noises straight out of the box, because I don't want to transfer 10TB worth of files to a drive that's just going to die on me in a year anyway.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Seagate Ironwolf NAS HDD Noise.mp3

Bombastinator · July 5, 2020

Sound file won’t load for me

Baz Lafr · July 5, 2020

8 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Sound file won’t load for me

Strange, it's only a normal .mp3 file. I uploaded it here.

Bombastinator · July 5, 2020

1 hour ago, Baz Lafr said:

Strange, it's only a normal .mp3 file. I uploaded it here.

Worked with the new link. Sounds ok to me. It’s not really grinding per se. just a really big HD doing it’s thing.

Baz Lafr · July 5, 2020

15 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Worked with the new link. Sounds ok to me. It’s not really grinding per se. just a really big HD doing it’s thing.

Excellent. Again, I was just worried that it was something unusual and I'd have to start worrying about the reliability of the drive. I haven't had a drive this large before so this new for me. Thanks for the reply.