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

 

[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?

 

[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

 

[xenon20]

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.

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.

 

[xenon20]

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

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!