HDD spinning fast causing noise and vibration

[xenon20]

Hi All,

I have two identical Toshiba X300 4TB HDD's in my PC running windows 11.

One of them is always spinning at full speed and is creating a lot of noise and vibration. When I remove power from the noisy one, the other one makes very little noise and vibration.

I have tried a few things:

- I have disabled the driver for the noisy drive and restarted the PC, but even with the driver disabled it's still spinning full speed and noisy.
- I noticed that the quieter drive did not have indexing enabled whereas the noisy one did, so disabled all indexing to no avail.
- I've looked at resource monitor to see if there is any I/O activity to the disk which there isn't.
- I've gone into power settings, and set the power plan to balanced, and experimented with the "turn off hard disk after x mins" in the advanced settings but to no avail.

Does anybody have any ideas about why one of the disks is noisy (constantly spinning at full speed) but the other one is still and quiet?
Could there be a bios setting that is causing this?
A setting in W11?

Thanks,
X20

 

[Philtor]

Have you checked the drive health using the likes of CrystalDiskInfo? This will also provide details as to the firmware version of each drive if I recall.

Could maybe bungee the noisy one assuming it’s not on the way out?

 

[xenon20]

Yes I have CDI and the health status is reported as good. The firmware is the same for both drives (FP1R). Strangely the temp of the noisy drive is 38 deg and the quiet one is 39 deg. Not too sure which of attributes in the lower list I would need to refer to.

Bungee it?

 

[Murphy]

Maybe worth checking each drives APM (automatic power management) settings in CDI, Function > Advanced Feature > AAM/APM Control. They should both be using the same settings but it's worth confirming it.

If they are it maybe worth running something like...

Download HddSleep - MajorGeeks

HddSleep is a simple program to check if your HDD is in sleep mode.

www.majorgeeks.com

To check if the less noisy drive is quieter because it's entering a sleep state or if a mechanical difference in the drives is what's making one more noisy.

 

[xenon20]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've confirmed that the AAM/APM control settings are identical in CDI for both drives.
Also HDDsleep utility says both drives are ACTIVE. How does this utility check for mechanical differences?

One difference is that the quieter drive is one large partition whereas the noisy drive has 4 smaller partitions. Don't suppose this should make a difference though.

Part of me wants to splurge on a new mainboard with several PCIe 4.0 / 5.0 M.2 slots but that will open a whole can of worms and probably stress trying to figure out what to buy lol