Question for WD VelociRaptor owners...

[oz]

If any of you own one or more of these drives, do yours make an intermittent click-click noise (it's a double-click) right after disk activity and then it continues that sound for a minute or so after that? Note that if you have a loud system at all, you might not ever hear this particular sound.

Both of my VelociRaptors make this subtle click-click noise for a while after disk activity, and in each case the clicking will eventually stop if no keyboard keys are pressed, and no mouse actions take place. The click-click noises are about 5 to 8 seconds apart, until they finally stop. If you do anything with the computer, here they go again. These clicks are somewhat annoying if you can hear them (at least they are to me). I am fully aware of the click of death syndrome that strikes some mechanical hard drives, but this seems to be different from that.

Lots of web searching has produced information about other VelociRaptor owners experiencing clicking sounds, some of which are drives going out, but some contend that these drives do this by default. I'm inquiring about it here because I'm uncertain if the sound that I'm hearing is the default sound they make, and if it isn't, I want to RMA these drives while they are still fairly new.

Thanks to any of you that can verify any clicking noises with your own WD VelociRaptor hard drive(s).

[GNU-Fan]

Hi,

I have two WD VelociRaptor connected as Raid0.
Now that you mentioned it, I can confirm to hear that click-click you have described.
It is not very high pitched, though. And it is not as loud as the noise during read/write access.

There are special cases for hard drives available in which you can put drives to be less audible, if it really annoys you.
Quiet Drive Internal HDD Silencer

[oz]

Hi,

I have two WD VelociRaptor connected as Raid0.
Now that you mentioned it, I can confirm to hear that click-click you have described.
It is not very high pitched, though. And it is not as loud as the noise during read/write access.

That's exactly the sound I'm referring to. I purchased these two drives on separate occasions, and with that noise on the the first one I thought for sure the drive was bad, but when the second one sounded the same I became unsure, yet worried, so started searching the web but the descriptions found online didn't really settle my concerns much, hence my post here.

Thanks for the info, GNU-Fan!

[HROAdmin26]

This type of sound is very common with higher-performance drives. It is related to heat and the drive "re-parking" the head (AFAIK) and very normal. I've had many generations of Seagate Cheetah's (10K and 15K) and they are gawd-awful noisy - one of their noises is the type of "clicking" you describe. At one point I changed to some Quantum 10K's and realized I missed the familiar clicking.

[oz]

Thanks for the verification, HROAdmin26

I posted this question on the Arch Forum as well since that's what I use and one of the members there suggests that this particular noise can be stopped by disabling APM with hdparm and a simple udev rule:

Not only velociraptor, also Caviar Black, and maybe others models with newer firmwares. Is the APM, disable APM with hdparm -B 255.

For example I done this for my wd black with an udev rule. [#1]

[#1] User:Djgera - ArchWiki

I might play around with that some to see how it goes.