Hard Drive Sometimes Emits a High Pitched Ringing Sound

[Deslumo]

As stated in the title, my hard drives sometimes produce a high pitched ringing sound, similar to tinnitus or this 13000HZ sound. My drives have never failed and exhibit normal operation and speeds, and additionally sound normal when it's not ringing. However, in HWInfo, there are a couple warnings for some drives, which have been listed down below:

 

S.M.A.R.T

 

- [C5] Current Pending Sector Count: 100/Always OK, Worst 100 (Data = 104,0)

- [C6] OFf-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count: 100/Always OK, Worst 100 (Data = 104,0)

 

Device Statistics

 

- Read Recovery Attempts: 24

- Number of Reallocation Candidate Logical Sectors: 104

- Number of High Priority Unload Events: 2

- Number of Reported Uncorrectable Errors: 24

 

For reference, I'm using 14TB Seagate Exos Enterprise drives, these are brand new, having under 200-hours of total power-on time. 

 

Does this high-pitched ringing signal an imminent drive failure? 

 

Thank you in advance for your support and expertise!

[Bombastinator]

Doesn’t sound like this does it? That would be... bad.

Listened to your test tone, I heard absolutely nothing.  Old ears probably.

Edited April 26, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Deslumo]

23 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Doesn’t sound like this does it? That would be... bad.

Listened to your test tone, I heard absolutely nothing.  Old ears probably.

Nope, it's more of a really sharp ringing that happens and stops. Also, that's absolute hard drive gore. 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Deslumo said:

Nope, it's more of a really sharp ringing that happens and stops. Also, that's absolute hard drive gore. 

As I said I can’t hear your recorded tone at all.  I hear nothing but silence.  Doesn’t mean there’s nothing there of course.  A reminder that I am not young I guess.  Ears and tastebuds get duller as one ages.  Back when I was young enough to be able to hear such things drives made a lot more noise than they do now, so I likely couldn’t recognize such a noise if it did indicate a problem. 

 

Most noises from mechanical HDs that are in good shape are noises the motors that move the head make.  The head never actually touches the platter. If it ever does it’s called a head crash and generally results instantly in a drive being completely and generally irreparably broken.  HDDs do degrade fairly quickly after they start to have problems.  It generally isn’t instant though it can be.  A drive less than 90% good generally has weeks or months to live, though they can hobble along for some time sometimes.  What I would do if I suspected a drive might have problems is run crystaldiskinfo to get an idea of if there were any bad sectors or tracks.

[nomisuke77]

"This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one."

No. This is the closest I could find to the problem I am having.

 

I can hear the 13K Hz video and that is definitely the same sound I am experiencing. On top of that, while the sound is being emitted, the drive cannot be accessed. It happens about 5% of the time when the drive is being written to or read from, but sometimes it will just start for no reason. The computer will not shut down while the drive is making that noise even though it is not the OS drive (it is one of 4 data drives). I am currently running a deep S.M.A.R.T. test on the drive using WD's Dashboard software, but Windows found no issues. Regardless, I am taking it out of the equation once all the data is moved to another drive. Not worth it to try and fix on a 2TB Green drive, especially one that is literally over a decade old. I will update this comment once the S.M.A.R.T. test is completed.

[Bombastinator]

How about crystaldiskinfo?

[nomisuke77]

WD Extended Diagnostic found no problems.

No issues with Crystal Disk Info.

It's not worth the hassle. I'm just going to turn it into a wind chime. I just wish I knew what was causing it.

[Bombastinator]

50 minutes ago, nomisuke77 said:

WD Extended Diagnostic found no problems.

No issues with Crystal Disk Info.

It's not worth the hassle. I'm just going to turn it into a wind chime. I just wish I knew what was causing it.

On the bright side HDDs are soooo much slower than SSDs.  They’re normally only used for very large bulk data these days.  Sort of a mid step between boot drives (which are usually nvme) and tape.  You probably want to do that anyway.  Might not need to go full wind chime (though the magnets in those things are really fun to play with) but bulk data storage is probably more in line.

[nomisuke77]

Yeah, it's going in the garbage. This will be my last entry before doing so.

I'm in the midst of wiping the drive by filling all sectors with 0. I know it will take more than a day given the drive's status.

While wiping, I took this short video.

 

Sound starts from the beginning.
Around 10 seconds the sound stops.
Around 14 seconds it starts again with a hard "squelch" sound.
The high pitch noise is very difficult to detect given the ambient hum from the PC, but it's there.

[SpaceKyd]

I know this topic has been dead a long time but it’s one of the only sources that actually matches a description of what I have experienced with one of my Seagate drives. I have 4 16TB Exos enterprise drives. Bought 2 and made them RAID and bought two more down the road and did the same. I got them refurbished off Amazon, and noticed the issue the same day I installed them. It’s been a few years and the issue has persisted but there has been no drive failure or indications of damage.

 

i would describe the noise as “the mosquito ringtone” or otherwise a very very high pitch whine. It’ll last 1-2 seconds, stop, come back again and end in a deep click sound. If the click sound doesn’t happen, it’ll repeat the whine until it clicks.

 

i have a gut feeling it’s occurring at a specific “spot” on one of the drives, because there have been months that the issue stopped but when I start messing with the data on the drive or running defrag it’ll return. It’s become more normal recently but I’ve been using it a lot more lately.

 

i am very frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be any info on what this noise means and if/how much it indicates a drive failure on the horizon. Starting to wish I had exchanges the drives when I first noticed the noise :/

[Ryker Robb]

On 5/23/2023 at 8:12 AM, nomisuke77 said:

Yeah, it's going in the garbage. This will be my last entry before doing so.

I'm in the midst of wiping the drive by filling all sectors with 0. I know it will take more than a day given the drive's status.

While wiping, I took this short video.

 

Sound starts from the beginning.
Around 10 seconds the sound stops.
Around 14 seconds it starts again with a hard "squelch" sound.
The high pitch noise is very difficult to detect given the ambient hum from the PC, but it's there.

Although this is an old post, i would still like the add that i couldn't hear the sound you were describing, but the "squelch" sound you described at 14 seconds sounds distinctly like a seagate drive parking it's heads, not from a wd20ezrx.

I would also like to add that this drive was at end of life anyways with over 1,243,324 load/unload cycles, out of 600,000 rated, which a lot of wd green drives can begin to fail at such a high load/unload count anyways.

[Ryker Robb]

3 hours ago, SpaceKyd said:

I know this topic has been dead a long time but it’s one of the only sources that actually matches a description of what I have experienced with one of my Seagate drives. I have 4 16TB Exos enterprise drives. Bought 2 and made them RAID and bought two more down the road and did the same. I got them refurbished off Amazon, and noticed the issue the same day I installed them. It’s been a few years and the issue has persisted but there has been no drive failure or indications of damage.

 

i would describe the noise as “the mosquito ringtone” or otherwise a very very high pitch whine. It’ll last 1-2 seconds, stop, come back again and end in a deep click sound. If the click sound doesn’t happen, it’ll repeat the whine until it clicks.

 

i have a gut feeling it’s occurring at a specific “spot” on one of the drives, because there have been months that the issue stopped but when I start messing with the data on the drive or running defrag it’ll return. It’s become more normal recently but I’ve been using it a lot more lately.

 

i am very frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be any info on what this noise means and if/how much it indicates a drive failure on the horizon. Starting to wish I had exchanges the drives when I first noticed the noise

Did you check smart info on those drives? Op did have some current pending sectors, and that could have been the problem with that drive. When disk drives attempt to read bad sectors(or bad servo data), they can sometimes emit a high frequency sound, similar to that 13khz test tone. But it could also be normal operation as well, they are using voice coils, after all. I would also recommend downloading victoria, you can use it to test the specific area of the drive where you think there might be a problem.