WD Red Drive Noise

[jasnw]

I am using a 2014 Mini running macOS 10.9.5 (yes, that’s old) with two external 2TB WD Red drives housed in OWC Mercury Elite Pro boxes as a household server. I replaced one of these drives (from 2013) with a 2019 4TB WD Red drive and have encountered a major annoyance. The existing drives are well behaved in that they are quiet in operation and when they’ve not had any accesses in a while they spin down and are dead silent. The 4TB replacement is noisier, which I can live with as it’s mostly used at night for backups, but it refuses to spin down when not in use and something is causing the head mechanism (my best guess) to glitch every 3-4 seconds. I can’t see any process that’s reading or writing to the drive (locally or via the network), so I’m not sure what’s happening. This continues even after I unmount the filesystem without ejecting the drive (via Disk Utility). I need to figure out what's going on and, I hope, fix it.

Is this something anyone here has encountered, and if so is there a fix?

 

[cmaier]

I am using a 2014 Mini running macOS 10.9.5 (yes, that’s old) with two external 2TB WD Red drives housed in OWC Mercury Elite Pro boxes as a household server. I replaced one of these drives (from 2013) with a 2019 4TB WD Red drive and have encountered a major annoyance. The existing drives are well behaved in that they are quiet in operation and when they’ve not had any accesses in a while they spin down and are dead silent. The 4TB replacement is noisier, which I can live with as it’s mostly used at night for backups, but it refuses to spin down when not in use and something is causing the head mechanism (my best guess) to glitch every 3-4 seconds. I can’t see any process that’s reading or writing to the drive (locally or via the network), so I’m not sure what’s happening. This continues even after I unmount the filesystem without ejecting the drive (via Disk Utility). I need to figure out what's going on and, I hope, fix it.

Is this something anyone here has encountered, and if so is there a fix?

It sounds like an issue with the drive. I use a lot of WD Reds, but all higher capacity (8TB and 12TB) and none of them make a lot of noise. And it sounds like your 2TB didn’t. So I doubt there’s something inherent in the design of the 4TB drives.

 

[jasnw]

Thanks. I've got a second 4TB to try out, hopefully it won't have the same annoying behavior. Is QC a thing of the past in these days of "everything is a disposable?"

 

[jeyf]

where a backup situation is not critical 4T drives are not expensive. I am suggesting you semi immediately buy a replacement at newegg.com

 

[jasnw]

I'll see how drive #2 does and replace #1 (hopefully JUST #1) soonest.

 

[jasnw]

Finally got back to this. Drive #2 showed the same behavior running in the same OWC box as the first one. I pulled the drive out and put it into an Inatech dock for bare drives, and got the same behavior. Over about a 4-5 second interval, there's a 'tick' followed in about a second or two by a 'tick-tock' (no, not a clock and NOT tiktok), most probably head movement noise. I bought these drives separately about a month apart, and long enough ago that I doubt Amazon will take them back.

I can't tell if this is a disk firmware issue or something in macOS that's trigging this. I see nothing in any of the system files, and all of the 2TB WD Red drives I've used have not done this (and were a lot quieter when in use). What's a good quiet 4TB spinner for use as backups?

 

[jasnw]

More info on the drives. Aside from the size, the differences are platter spin rate (5400 RPM for the 2TB, 7200 RPM for the 4TB) and the NASware version (2.0 on the 2TB, 3.0 on the 4TB). The serial# for the 2TB is WD20EFRX and for the 4TB it's WD4003FFBX. I'm tempted to get a 5400 4TB Red drive to see if that makes any difference. If it's something new in the NASware, nothing I can do but look for another vendor.

 

[jasnw]

Well, some googling tells me that this is a "feature": https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14842

 

[jasnw]

So, I purchased the 5400 RPM version of the 4TB Red drive (WD40EFZX) and it is behaving like the 2TB 5400 RPM drives. Nice and quiet, and spins down into a sort of sleep mode when nothing has happened for a while. Since I don't need speed for these drives, my problem is solved. I'm going to stock up on these before WD decides to add the noisy 'feature' from the 7200 RPM drives to their 5400 RPM drives.