Can hard drives get quieter after first use?

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I bought two Seagate NAS HDDs for my home server and after putting them in, the computer went from completely silent to actually quite noisy which I wasn't happy with.

The noise wasn't from vibration, it was a sort of high pitched whistling sound (the motor I assume). After a while of trying to find out if it was one of the drives in particular (it wasn't), I went to bed. In the morning the computer seemed to be much quieter, still louder than before, but back to near silent.

So my question is, could this be because the drives were burning in or something? Is it possible that they could get quieter after one nights use? Or was it all in my head!

Anake

Posted 2014-01-18T21:03:01.967

Reputation: 300

I am going with the simplest theory. It was all in your head. While its possible it was slightly out of balance and it corrected itself. The high pitched whistling is the more concerning. – Ramhound – 2014-01-18T21:19:52.907

Thanks. It's strange because I've been running read/write tests with badblocks and the only noise I can hear is the same when they are idling. Do you think it's enough to qualify for RMA? – Anake – 2014-01-18T21:24:26.260

Only if you find it annoying enough. Unless they are failing a S.M.A.R.T your RMA might be denied though. – Ramhound – 2014-01-18T21:35:32.293

if you just bought them, then return them? why would you RMA? – Sickest – 2014-01-18T22:52:13.207

There have been cases of new HDD that fail SMART test. My workplace bought 12 HDD to put in a NAS, and one of the HDD reporting fail when doing raid sync. Run the NAS smart testing tool, and it reported fail. Pretty much a case of DOA (Dead on Arrival). – Darius – 2014-01-18T23:40:27.160

Answers

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What you heard was bearing noise and isn't at all uncommon in many mechanisms. Many people don't notice it, especially compared to the noise of the fans most computers have. But if you have a fanless NAS box and it is in a room where you are trying to sleep, it may drive you insane!

And, yes, it may well have got quieter after a while. The bearings are lubricated and this can take a while to quieten down. If the disks are now running quietly, I wouldn't worry about it.

One interesting thing is that disks most commonly fail on powering up after a power down. Even cheap disks can run for years often without problems if kept powered up though the information density of current generations of disks is so high that it only takes a tiny transient issue to make a mess of things.

If SMART is turned on, check that they are not giving high levels of errors under load and that the temperature isn't getting high. Don't, of course, check them when the system is not doing anything. But I doubt you will find anything wrong.

Julian Knight

Posted 2014-01-18T21:03:01.967

Reputation: 13 389

Asked: 2014-01-18T21:03:01.967

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Active: 2014-01-18T22:42:09.663