MP 1,1-5,1 Repeating HDD sounds (iStat Menus S.M.A.R.T. enabled?)

[macstatic]

My main hard drive (Seagate 10TB Exos X10 enterprise ST10000NM0016-1TT101) is emiting a repeating sound pattern -sort of like it's stuck and retrying something. These enterprise drives are very loud when it comes drive-seek, so it's easy to hear (listen to the attached MP3 recording -don't mind the noisy CPU fan which I'm planning to replace soon!).

I've tried quitting all apps, rebooted etc. It's still there.

So next I ran DriveDX, which tells me the drive is OK. But if I run a self-test it says "unknown result". Actually this happens with every drive I test (two SSDs and two HDDs), so I click on the "troubleshooting" button which leads me to this info-page that tells me:

Self-test can be aborted if 2 or more SMART check programs are running simultaneously, list of possible apps: DriveGenius (with enabled DrivePulse plug-in), iStat Menu, etc.

Disable SMART check/monitoring in other apps because they excessively polling drive’s SMART subsystem that leads to unexpected abortion of all SMART-related operations.

I do actually have iStat Menus, but it's currently not running though I do find it a little cumbersome and confusing -does it actually run all the time if you've got it installed on your drive? Do I need to de-install it completely?
How do I find out if there are other apps that check the SMART status of my drives?

 

[rx78]

Certainly doesn't sound normal. I've had consumer Seagate's fail on me with the hard drive repeatedly clicking like that so make a backup of your haven't already.

 

[macstatic]

Ouch! My drive is only a few months old.

But I believe I found the cause! I found it strange that by logging into another user account the noise was gone (and despite iStat menus running), so I logged back into my usual account, ran "Activity Monitor" to see my active processes and pinpointed it down to TG Pro (which I'm using to monitor my fan speeds/internal temperature prior to and while replacing the mentioned noisy fan).
It turns out that two settings causes the hard drive noise:

Adjusting the "update frequency" caused the noise to not happen as frequently (I suppose this is how often TG Pro should take all its sensor-readings), but disabling "Check hard drive temperature using SMART" made the repeating noise pattern stop completely! It also let me do the drive checks in DriveDX again.
Phew!!! So apparently the drive is OK (but the noise was driving me crazy! I'm planning to move at least one of my hard drives to the optical bay using a shock-mounted 5.25" drive adapter. That leaves the Time Machine drive (also a noisy enterprise drive), but one is better than nothing).

 

[rx78]

Nice find!

 

[macstatic]

Thanks
Hopefully useful info for others as well.