WD 500GB Blue 2.5" = noisy seek click

[DaveSimmons]

I'm using a Shuttle XS35 for my new music jukebox and it's working well except the seek clicks from the WD are a little noisier than I'd like. (At least I'm guessing they're seek clicks, happening about every 5 seconds in normal use.)

Is there a drive utility somewhere that can set a slower quiet mode? It's a playback only server so drive speed doesn't matter.

If not, are there any quieter 500+ GB notebook drives? I can't wait 3 years for 500 GB SSD prices to drop to reasonable levels

 

[tweakboy]

Looks like your getting a lot of HD thrashing. Every 5 seconds that is no good.

Something is up and I don't want to blame the HD just yet.

Try, running defrag and also turn off search indexing Windows Search and get back to us.

Oh also install the latest Intel chipset drivers or nVidia mobo drivers whicever you have. gl let us know what happens

Also make sure the swap file is disabled and you are not using one.

 

[VirtualLarry]

wow, an insightful post from tb. it could well be windows indexing service.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Unfortunately I had already applied the "don't index this" checkbox to the drive, and made sure both the old Index and newer Windows Search services are disabled. So it isn't those two.

Next is to run a tool like filemon to see what processes are reading from the HD.

In case it matters the PC is running Windows 7 Professional 32-bit on an Atom D510 with 2 GB of RAM. It's a clean Windows install with no extra bloat (I have MSDN for work) with only Flash 10.1 and Foobar 2000 installed so far.

 

[Soulkeeper]

I just put a 500GB blue drive into someone's computer and noticed noise as well ...

it sounds like the read heads touching the platters (of course she had thrown the hard drive in the backseat of her truck...)

maybe they just require a "break-in" period before the sounds becomes less noticeable. Also the system it went into only has a psu fan, and small cpu fan so you can hear everything.

 

[fuzzymath10]

It might be an aggressive power-saving feature like parking heads. All my Seagate Momentus(es?) do this, as does my work laptop with a Scorpio. It didn't bother me, but you could try changing the power management/acoustics using a tool like hddscan.