HDD spinning fast causing noise and vibration

xenon20

xenon20

xenon20

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28 Aug 2013
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58
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
 
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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?
 
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.

CDI-SS-Toshiba.jpg


Bungee it?
 
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...
www.majorgeeks.com

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.
 
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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 :D but that will open a whole can of worms and probably stress trying to figure out what to buy lol
 
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xenon20 said:
Also HDDsleep utility says both drives are ACTIVE. How does this utility check for mechanical differences?
Click to expand...
It doesn't/can't check for mechanical differences but if the power settings and sleep states are the same, if all other things are equal, you'd expect them to be making similar noise so any difference could be down to mechanical differences.

The last thing I'd check before calling that though is to fire up perfmon in Windows and monitor the noisy drive to check if something is reading/writing to the drive.

Partition layout wouldn't make one drive of the same model more noisy than another, if it's not a software setting thing (not sleeping/APM), then it will either be one drive is being read/written too and the other isn't or some sort of mechanical difference between the drives.
 
xenon20 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Been a while since I played with HDDs but see if you can find any info about Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) modes on your drives. Sometimes you can enable the AAM mode to quieten a drive.
 
I've used Perfmon to check that there are no disk reads or writes to either of these drives after the computer has booted.

When you say mechanical differences between them, what kind of thing do you mean? As they are identical drives (same make and model). Could it be something like a jumper link on the drive somewhere?

In CDI, the option to enable AAM doesn't do anything and I cant find any info that Toshiba drives support it.

CDI-AAM-Toshiba.jpg


I think I may possibly have some portable programs that run from the noisy drive as my downloads folder is on it and I may have links on my desktop that run from the disk but obviously they are not running at startup (nothing in task manager > startup items that relates to the drive).

I've just done a backup using reflect to the quieter drive (which is my backups drive) and during this the drive was very quiet, when touching the drive all you felt was the odd clunk (as expected) but the noisy drive below it is permanently vibrating (night & day). I reckon this has to be something related to a power setting rather anything to do with data transfer because the noisy drive is running full speed as soon as the PC gets switched on.
 
The drive health is ok so I would just bungee it (see video posted above).

It would be good to know what’s causing it mind but might never get to the bottom of it and life is too short :D
 
I just tried to boot the PC from off and I could feel the drive clunking as the PC booted, suggesting that it is being accessed during boot. Any ideas how I can find out why ?

It would be good to know what’s causing it mind but might never get to the bottom of it and life is too short :D
Click to expand...

Yes I tend to agree, I just wanted to check if there was something obvious or a simple fix for it before just accepting that's the way it is!
 
xenon20 said:
When you say mechanical differences between them, what kind of thing do you mean? As they are identical drives (same make and model). Could it be something like a jumper link on the drive somewhere?
Click to expand...
When i say mechanical differences i mean some sort of manufacturing/mechanical issue with the drive as if, like you say, they're identical drives with identical APM/sleep settings and very similar access patterns you'd expect similar noise profiles from both drives.
 
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