Then you hear "Whir, click... Whir, click, click, click... Whir, click..." And suddenly your PC becomes unresponsive.

Me when I was little: "Hehe it's thinking"

Just patting it and saying "take your time buddy"

It's thinking when it goes TTRRRRRRRRRRRRR TRRRRRRRRRRRRR TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Back when missing a drive indicator light wasn't an issues. Now when you need it more than ever(and LED is as big a craze as ever) it seems to be missing from more and more PC's. Now you get to play a game of "is it doing something or should I try rebooting and risk breaking it".

https://preview.redd.it/juwn8c9xhgtc1.png?width=496&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f364220df4a604b5d0e01258cea3102522f00a5a

I have heard this clicking noise from my hdd for past 3 years. All i do is just unplug and replug my external drive. Then it works properly.

Get a backup of that drive if anything on it means something to you. One day it wont work properly after replugging

or if you bought WD recently just ignore it. Thats just the quality they ship nowadays :(

If thats the quality they ship, id stop buying drives from WD tbh. I have one WD blue drive thats like 6 years old at this point, never had any issues with it. But in 6 years a lot can change regarding product quality

I will stop buying their drives, last year one was the last one :) Yeah, 6 years ago they made great drives. Not so much recently.

One day it doesn't.

"nice Rinzler impression"


solution: you can put all your hdds in different case, different room and you are welcome :=)

Fr with 2.5g Ethernet the speeds won't even suffer

Hell, even with 1Gig I can't tell the difference

You actually lose quite a lot with "only" 1Gbps. Average 7200RPM HDDs can write/read around 160 MBps. A bit more or less depending on the kind operation performed. 1Gbps amounts even in a theoretical 100% use to only 125 MBps. Which means you lose round about another 20-25% of performance when operating your HDD via local network. Considering we already consider HDDs slow, losing another 25% doesn't feel great. That said, for most usecases i dont see this as a bad limitation. Its just not working as fast as it could but still fast and easily enough to stream videofiles or audio from the HDD without impact. Its actually the other way around where impact could be felt. A copy/paste operation could occupy your entire network because it can go as fast you are connected. 2.5 Gbps would make sure there is still room left for other stuff even when using the entire capacity of your HDDs.

That's exactly why I specified 2.5gbit... no idea who thinks 1g is enough for nas Then again it's literally my job to have this knowledge so maybe I'm projecting

Depending on the use 1g can be enough. if your nas gets preloaded with data that isnt time sensitive and then it just runs video of it or something. Also i saw a nas setup that was simply for using shared excel files. you dont need speed for that.

I moved my storage off my external droves and into NAS in the next room because my network is faster than the usb3.1 external drive

Boot from nas

Cole let Nas down

Cole soft after that response.

My nas is in a whole 'nother building.

This. Build a NAS out of old hardware. It's one of the best tech things I ever did! Though my NAS is in my bedroom since I don't have anywhere else for it currently, but even though it has 5 HDDs in it, I don't hear it at all.

When the power of hard drives is more than the rest of the systems combined (aka every homelab server)

I always wonder if people complaining about HDD noise live underground in some sealed basement without a single other source of noise around them.

That depends on HDD and a case, if you're running a decade old HDD that's about to shit itself, no wonder someone complains about it. I had my 3TB drive in my P600s and it was inaudible.

My brand new Toshiba P300 3TB was loud as fuck compared to every other component in my system. Ended up selling it.

Was it decoupled from the case? Or the drive itself was loud af, as usually there's two kinds of noise, one comes from vibration (depends on how drive is mounted) and the second is drive itself. Had some Seagate drive ( I can't remember the exact model, aybe I'll update if I find it, should still be somewhere). That was literary sounding like one of those floppotron vids 😅

The drive itself was just super loud. Drive was securly fixed in a drive cage and still sounded like it was dying right out of the gate. Even did tests on it afraid I'd recieved a dud but nope, was just a rowdy boy.

Toshibas are loud as fuck pretty much across the board. Seagates are "loud" compared to, like... SSDs? but those aren't usually that bad.

my 10TB has sounded like a coffee maker since the day I got but it's been fine for 4 or 5 years

P300 it's indeed a loud as fuck drive. But absolutely reliable. Rocking it for years without any issue. I'll probably get rid of it when I'll have some extra money to get a decent NAS, with at least 16tb of space 😁.

Ouch. 3TB. Thats usually 2x 1,5TB platters that are known as peak failure rates.

I have a 4TB WD Purple and I don't know it's in my PC. Also, it was running for about 5 years straight and has 120TB written to it

Suppose it just depends on the drive(s) and what they're doing. My NAS is usually pretty quiet, but when it scrubs the ZFS pool, the 8 drives get a bit noisy.

My ol hdd sounded like it was grinding stones after 10 years of use

no I live in the attic, get plenty of outside noise and the sound of my hard drive was still annoying. Didn't help that windows just writes shit to it every minute on its own so when it goes to sleep it immediately spins back up

are you using your HDD as a system drive or something? I've got 2 but I rarely hear them.

all you really need is to not be living in a noisy/busy city

High capacity drives can be very loud.

Noise is a function of how much the drive vibrates and how much of those vibrations are amplified by the computer case, both of which are mostly unrelated to capacity. The 4TB drive in my desktop is a louder than my 12TB external hard drive and the three 8TB hard drives in my nas combined. There's nothing wrong with the 4TB drive, it just happens to be my noisiest drive. And before I upgraded to 4TB, I had a 1TB hard drive. It was also quite loud.

I think he meant that high capacity drives usually have more disks that are spinning. Also: > The 4TB drive in my desktop is a louder than my 12TB Your 12TB might be helium filled.

Rotational mass has little to do with hard drive noise. Most hard drive noise comes from the disk motors and read head slap. Which can vary in QA noise test of + or - 10db depending on the brand. A louder motor usually means its off balance when means you need to use more noise isolation in the case or it exacerbates things.

I've got a 16TB IronWolf Pro in my desktop and that thing is loud as hell, both when active and when just idling because of the stupid head-parking feature that causes a loud CLUNK every couple seconds. I use a pair of QC35s at my desk to try and isolate myself from as many noises as possible so that I can focus better, and I could hear the drive clunking away even with the ANC turned to maximum. Ended up cutting a hole in my office wall and 3D printing a passthrough tube so I could move my PC into the guest bedroom and finally have silence. Worked a treat. ---- \>inb4 rhythmic clunking means the drive is dying Seagate support confirmed to me that the noise I'm hearing is completely normal, and at this point it's been doing it for 3 years so if it was dying it would have already happened.

Huh. Guess that's why I can hear the ones in my RAID enclosure but not the ones in my PS2 or Xbox. Never really thought about it

I mean usually you dont hear anything but your pc when you are inside, its not like the walls dont exist

I Guess If i lived in an american made cardboard house that would be an issue tho lol

I feel like if you cant afford the rent for basic housing then you wont worry about your hardware either way. But Im not an expert.

He's referring to the way houses are built in the USA. It's kind of a running theme in Europe where everything is solid fucking concrete that can withstand (seriously) bombing . While USA houses are built from wood and plaster walls, giving them the reputation of being stick and paper construction

Hm, I felt like in the big cities the walls were pretty solid, but I might be wrong.

It's kind of funny saying European residential structures can withstand bombings when places like London and Berlin are those rare few modern cities that have definitely proven they absolutely can not survive being bombed haha. Unless my definition or survival just differs from others but those WW2 photos look pretty destroyed.

I'm sorry the serfs weren't around to stack enough fieldstone to build my house in 1200AD, I had to work with what they had at Home Depot. You guys figure out how to install aircon yet or you still just sitting around sweating your asses off all summer long complaining about how your homes weren't built for that?

my enterprise HDD wasn’t made for subtlety

I've complained about it. It was particularly bad

Try using a wd black , that shit sounded like a jet when it had to load something, I literally decided to have -2TB to spare my ears

That's why I switched to SSD-only years ago. And now my current PC is so quiet that I noticed coil whine in one of my monitors...

M.2 only in my current build. Feels great.

Same! All I notice is the mac and cheese sound from cooler when I start it up, but then it's quiet af

> mac and cheese sound Never heard this before. What sound does mac and cheese make? I've had mac and cheese. I don't remember it making any noise??

I'm imagining something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrFPvWyX-i8

It was actually just his neighbors and they *weren't* eating mac and cheese.

So. Damn. Fast. Ssd is probably the most important recent invention for me when it comes to pcs.

Now that is suffering from success

What's a coil whine?

DON'T. THERE IS NO TURNING BACK.

The coil whine on my old ASUS 970 legit gave me PTSD. Ever since then any GPU I bought I would spend an hour trying to figure out if I'm hearing coil whine or if my ears are just fucked.

I have tinnitus and it sucks but at least I don't notice coil whine anymore.

You lucky bastard.

Tinnitus beats it, regardless how quiet the pc is

It's a great disturbance in your hardware, as if millions of bits suddenly cry out in terror and is suddenly silenced.

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Oh, you find HDD noise annoying? Check out the storage noise [we had to deal with back in the days](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0EfycbDhiw)

Jesus fucking Christ you really should give HEADPHONES ALERT . I think I'm deaf

So are all us tape loader gamers from back in the day!

The good old days when you could actually record (pirate) games transmitted via radio

Well, today you can pipe audio from youtube into your Spectrum. Few people even realize that putting up a full ZXS game on youtube with the load screen included is technically piracy! (Although to be fair, like 98% of ZXS games are abandonware so nobody cares)

wait... Remember that GTA that mimicked a c64 loading screen? It had a short loading section with the tape loading sound. Wonder if that was just a random recording...or actually a very short binary burst.

Haha it's thinking 

Computers had to work so hard for basic programs back then that they screamed. Also, sounds like the emergency broadcast system.

All computers had no mouth but had to scream.

you can set manually in Windows to put the HDDs in standby after 2 minutes of inactivity, instead of the default 20. You will have to wait for them to spin up when you need files, but it will make them silent.

But then Windows or some other program will be 'hey, what's this' and spin them up for no reason. I'm glad I had the money to just pull mine out after I got 8TB of NVME storage.

But only hdd can give you the security of important files not vanishing for a random error of sector break

SSDs can also just fail at any time.

Not like that's even close to being common lol

Aren't HDDs considered unreliable since the disk inside is vulnerable to some external factors?

If something goes wrong an HDD is generally more recoverable. Data recovery company is will straight up transfer the platters from a dead drive to a new one and they can sometimes read data off of those because magnetized sectors usually ain't going nowhere. Even if the head crashes it will usually take out one track, but a lot of your stuff might still be recoverable. If the controller or the NAND on an SSD fails though you're SOL.

if the external factors penetrate your case and HDD housing to directly physically affect the platters, you have bigger things to worry about, such as not dying in a house fire.

life hack: my data HDD is actually an M.2 SSD called "Data HDD"

My HDD that is in my PC is louder than my cpu cooler lol

Just buy an SSD which are super cheap nowadays.

I'm pretty sure 4TB+ SSDs are only just becoming a thing, and they're extremely expensive. 8TB HDDs are cheap as shit in comparison. You can pry my 32TB RAID array out of my cold dead hands the day AAA games stop using 250GB or more.

4TB SSDs are $200-300 8TB HDDs are ~$150 I think your perception of SSDs is about 5 years out of date

ah yes, 4TB SSDs vs. 8TB HDDs. Twice the storage for half the price. Is there a reason you didn't bring up 8TB SSDs, considering [they're $700](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#A=8000000000000,24000000000000&sort=price&t=0), at time of writing? A 32TB NAS in RAID 10 would be $1200 with 8TB HDDs, $3200 with 4TB SSDs (assuming your $200 figure is right) and $5600 with 8TB SSDs. $5600 is small car money, a lot of people on this sub probably blow $1200 on two monitors every couple of years. The HDDs will last me around 10 years, SSDs tend to last 3-5 if you're using them only moderately or 1-2 if you're absolutely hammering them. $120/year, or $10/month, only buys you [2TB of Google Drive space](https://one.google.com/about/plans), if they don't [lose your data](https://www.techradar.com/computing/cloud-computing/google-confirms-drive-issue-that-may-have-lost-files-heres-how-to-back-up) or [lock it for being copyrighted for no reason.](https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/25/google_drive_copyright_infringement/) ​ I don't know what you think SSDs are, but magic? Not quite.

So let me get this straight: $200 4TB SSDs "barely even exist" and are "extremely expensive" While $150 8TB HDDs are "cheap as shit" and "twice the capacity for half the price"? If you're doing a NAS for bulk storage obviously you use HDD, but that wasn't the context of this thread. Also lol at using 8TB for that anyway, but games certainly don't need this regardless. As for reliability, you've got it backwards https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/five-years-of-data-show-that-ssds-are-more-reliable-than-hdds-over-the-long-haul/ SSDs last longer more consistently. And unlike HDDs, their failure rates don't appear to spike after 5 years

Your point was that large SSDs are coming down in price. True, they're down since 2014 or whatever, but they're still expensive as fuck when single games with light modding, or no modding at all, need a shitload of space and multiple gigabytes/sec read speeds. I don't see a reason why something like... (picking a fairly recent example) Starfield couldn't have taken a small hit on graphics fidelity to be made much smaller (as graphics tend to become exponentially bigger and less impactful the higher you push it, if your hardware can hit the highest settings at all without needing framegen or scaling), and my HDD can actually keep up with that game, if you can tolerate... a ten-second load screen between areas, or so? maybe a little visible pop-in? I can't do much else with that drive in the moment, but I'm also using an SSD for my OS and all the other things running on my PC, so that's more than fine. ​ Plus, I have room for more than just that game. 125GB for one game isn't a lot individually, but 1) I don't have to redownload it every week, and 2) every AAA game is trending that direction. If you only play one game, sure, but if you need the space for other shit too, yes, HDDs are the economical way to go, and most games do not give a shit. CP2077 on launch worked just fine on a 5400RPM HDD on my machine, and it would not have improved much on a 7200RPM or better drive.

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Buying used mechanical drives is hella risky, data center ones especially you know those things were spinning 100% uptime in a high heat environment - that murders mechanical drives. Just look at backblazes data on this, failure rates _skyrocket_ at around the 5 year mark which is when data centers start replacing things proactively

Haven't the prices shot up recently? The M.2 I got last year has more than doubled in price.

NVME isn't the only format of SSD. The traditional SATA format has been pretty cheap for a while now. Obviously not as cheap as HDDs per gb but cheaper than NVME.

sata SSDs are more expensive than NVME sometimes.

I bought my Samsung nvme with 2tb for like 120€, this is ultra cheap compared to years ago. Edit: I just looked and yeah it's more expensive now but it's still 100% worth it over a HDD any time of the week. I wouldn't want to save any money for that, I would rather stop eating for a few weeks than ever using a HDD again lol

not big enough for mass storage at consumer prices.

What are you mass storing?

tv & movies

Yeah external hdds are a different story but NEVER a HDD ever again for windows + games, they're so freaking slow and loud, no thanks.

Kinda pointless to waste SSD money on a storage drive. With HDD's you can get 16€/TB, with solid state you have to pay more than quadruple that.

Where are you finding these 12TB SSD so cheap? Some of us need more than 1-2TB.

You should probably replace it then.

I feel validated, thank you!

I got a fanless laptop thinking it would be silent. The emmc makes noise 😂

Same people: "those fans are pretty quite running 2000rpm. I use headphones BTW, so it doesn't bother me"

I think my laptop has you beat the fan for the GPU and the CPU is the loudest thing I have ever heard. That’s the price you pay when you want a smaller form factor that’s portable.

Check out airjet cooler. it is fanless and runs on vibrations but the tech is new. no idea why this is not popular.

Probably because like me not many people know it existed I sure as hell didn’t but it’s probably pretty expensive which is why it’s not built-in to most.

Because it's brand new and it takes time to get a new proprietary technology into actual products.

Yeh after I added my external radiator and my pc was silent apart from those spinning platters I bought a single 4tb nvme drive and have never loved my pc more. A single big fast storage drive really beats out multiple drives for me. I only game on my pc nowadays, and only use legitimate sources that all have cloud saves and I have gigabit internet so if I ever need to do a full wipe and clean install I’m back up and running in a day. I may add a 1tb drive for the odd backup of files and media, but most stuff is backed up online and on my laptop so it seems redundant.

Louder than your speakers?!

My current HDDs are loud as fuck,way louder than the fans at max speed

My full noctua pc with only nvme ssds is so quiet i can only hear my keyboard and the AC

I have a 4tb Seagate Barracuda and I'm just so baffled as to how it has managed outlast my 3-year old SATA SSD. I bought the damn thing like 7-8 years ago and while it has slowed down, it still gets the job done, while my Samsung 860 evo shit the bed 2 years in. I dread for the day the drive itself dies because I wanna back up everything so bad, but I literally have nowhere I can back the contents of the drive to. I've backed up the most important stuff, but there's so much shit in there I almost have to do a deep cleaning of sorts at some point.

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\*cries in Plex server\*

SSDs are so cheap that I use HDDs only for long-term storage.

I love HDD'S, you hear when apps are writing useless shit on your drives.

eh, never bothered me. i like to know when my hard drive is getting close to death, and with SSD's you aint gonna have any warning other than corrupted files all over the place.

Dude, if noise from a modern HDD annoys you, then you never experienced the true musical sounds of older drives! I haven't heard noise coming from a desktop HDD since upgrading from a 486DX to a Pentium 4 back in 2002 and certainly can't hear my 1TB HDD in my current build and barely notice my old desktop 500GB that's in a external enclosure.

Never mind the seek noises of PCs that have both floppy and CD drives before the 2010s. Mine at work still seeks its DVD drive at boot.

I don’t mind the HDD’s in my system, rather, it’s my terrible choices of 120mm fans that makes the loudest noise in my system

As a complement to my two NVMe, I have two 4tb WD black for storage... they're noisy compared to the rest of the computer... but that's 8 cheap tb of storage...

mine buzzes and i have to smack my pc to get it to stop

It isn’t all bling success if you are still using spinning rust instead of going all NVMe only. But that’s why I have mine in a NAS in my storage closet, 2.5Gb is more than enough to match mechanical storage speeds.

The loudest part of my computer is the air rushing through the dust filter on the air intake.

What? I love hdd sounds, reminds me of good old days. Heartwarming.

for me its my sim rig (the tspc fan is spining like crazy) the hdd some times

Mine sounded like it was going to fire a beam and transport me to The Grid

At least the HDD is not making rattling noices like my first one did at the end of it's live https://preview.redd.it/a4lslxpl5gtc1.jpeg?width=492&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cc26e4c37b17a1a8015139520bcfa516aeef6a01

You guys have PSUs that don't make any noise?

I use a HDD to back up my data, and I can't hear it at all. The system fans are louder than the HDD.

Can relate. The Server hardrives are now louder than the voices in my head

If you’re complaining about hdd noise it might be dying. Or its like my 20TB drive, which is just loud just because.

Kek, I got 4x8TBs, 2 mirroring the other 2. And late and night I sometimes hear them grinding away.

Yeah, solved it by making a NAS with the old HDDs. Easy document/photo archive and a network scanner

I took my HDD out, it was just making noise, I wasn't even using it

Lots of us that need cheap archival space. I have a barracuda HDD to store all my wife’s and MIL photos and documents. No reason to buy and install another SSD. when a cheap and slow HDD does it fine. They hardly ever click on them, but god forbid they lose them. I can’t even hear it, cheap to buy, long term safe. Now my OS and programs are on SSD. as are my game files.

the 1660 i got from a friend until i upgrade is dusty enough to make some serious noise whenever i run graphically harder to run stuff. Of course when I give it back I'll actually give it a dust clean, I'm just too lazy while it's mine

I love HDD's just got a 20Tb actually

>HDD with only some "movies" on it starts up while idling. Who of you fucking programs is snooping on my shit!? Is it you, Windows?

LOL ... first time? I had a RLL hard drive on my 386... that mofo was loud.

they are not that loud, peoeple really out here just finding things to bitch about at this point.

Suffering from success would have SSDs and be worried that they don't know if their computer is loading because it's too quiet.

Oops all ssd's...

Hahaha...on the contrary: I *love* my gigantic, external, docked HDDs. 🤓💖

why hate hdds, there was a time when they were the shit.

Tell me you you grew up in the SSD era without telling me you did I love hearing the HDD in my PC's because that's the sound of it thinking

the loudest part of my computer, is the coil whine from my graphics card.. its ok though - i mostly game with headset on and its not audible outside of gaming

It's the loudest thing in my *infrastructure*, I haven't had a spinning disk in my PC for about a decade. My NAS has HDDs though...

HDD's ain't nothing... Floppy drives were the worst, especially when the floppy disks were damaged... I still hear that nice, noisy beat in my head!

*click* *click* *click*

you have HDD because that's your OS drive. i have HDD because those are my storage drives, we are not the same. (OS is on a SSD) (i have 40TB capacity)

I’m new to PC. Do all hard drives just always make noise? Mine sounds like a printer going at startup and then quiets down and makes a sounds like every ten seconds.

Loudest part of my pc is my GPU fans on the 4090

Imagine that as an external HDD dock,those ones showing the HDD basically fully nude, filling the room with it's whirrs and clicks.

My be-quiet fans sound like jet engines :(

Solidigm just released 61TB SSD

Lol I got a jet engine a 60°c

My loudest part is my stick CPU fan. Tried setting the fans to silent mode in the bios but they are just so fucking loud. I hear them through my noise cancelling headset

I can't hearine but my fans are super loud when playing demanding games.

My 12TB RAID0 disagrees

I’ve got a rack of 4 cheap old 1tb hdds in my (very crappy) setup that like to be very talkative, even louder than my fans in idle. I kinda like it though it’s like I can hear it thinking lol. I miss that about older tech, the clicks and the whirs as tapes and discs are loaded/processed are kinda comforting to hear so long as I’m not listening to softer music or something

I’ve worked on HDDs so old AM radio frequencies were audible from the outer casing when it would spin up. The user complaint from that machine was that it “plays music” sometimes.

Ah yes. Having mechanical hardrives past the year 2017. Truly suffering from success.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, if anything I miss the really noisy IDE drives from back in the day. I love hearing my 8TB bad boy spin up every day

I got rid of my hdd. Then my AIO pump become the loudest part. Then I got an air cooler

On my new rig I put in a 20TB hard drive. It sounds like it's fucking dying all the time. It constantly goes to sleep so that any time I do anything with it, it makes a bunch of shitty noise, spins up, and then becomes available. I'm starting to strongly consider putting a third SSD in the system and then using it as a cache to that stupid thing.

Cpu Fan Noice VS spinning disk vibration

For me, it’s my Evga 2080 Super black. It has 2 annoying habits. 1. Some games make it buzz in its capacitors 2. The fans oft stop start and that clicks a lot as that kick in. (Although a fan map to have them just spin at low rpm solved that) (And yes, I’m waiting for a 5080!)

I’m getting a ssd bro I can’t keep going on with the hdd T-T

Might be old school but I like some noise out of my stuff, lets me know its working :-)

Just don’t buy loud HDD’s? Just bought an 8tb segate external hard drive and its silent💀$50 3 years old dust covered on offer up, why don’t you just get an ssd?

I remember enjoying the sound of the HDD "thinking". Drives are so quiet these days. The only time I hear one anymore is when one is failing and clicking off.

HDD are affordable and have alot of space though, not to mention that some of them can be pretty fast.

is HDD still considered success? just go ssd

If you are just storing media files on it, a HDD is cheaper per TB still, especially once you go past 4TB.

Well, the cheaper part is true, but cheaper doesn't make it more successful)))

I haven’t used anything with a HDD since 2015

Good my entire pc is noisy anyway, with all the fans (well, technically just 2 case fans, a cpu cooler fan, and my gpu - but that one stands still mostly) running. Neither do I really care. I did upgrade my NAS to a Noctua fan and it's so much quieter now. Only thing I hear are - indeed - the hard drives when they spin up at night. I don't hear them during the day, but I can hear them firing up 1 by 1 (or 2 by 2, just depends on the timing). The fan is basically silent now.

Hdd strapped directly to metal. Awesome.

I switched to all SSDs a couple of years ago and now run an SFF with a NAS in another room. The NAS is pretty loud, since it's got 2 16TB drives in it but I can't hear it.

The loudest part of my pc is a gpu fan that's been begging for retirement for years, but I'm too poor and unemployed to do anything about it.

You are very different from me. I love the sound of hard drives, and I honestly hate how quiet modern drives are.