I recently bought a new 20TB Seagate IronWolf HDD. The retailer's packaging wasn't great, although the box showed no obvious damage. I installed the drive in a PC, reformatted it as ext4, and started transferring data to it. During the final part of the transfer, it began making loud, repetitive noises that sound a bit like a typewriter or thumping mechanism. I've read that large-capacity hard drives can make unusual sounds, and another 20TB drive I bought has made similar noises since the first day without developing problems. However, this new drive is noticeably louder. It is a 7200 RPM model. Could this be normal drive activity, or should I be concerned that it may be defective?
3 Answers
You can try acoustic management with hdparm’s -M option. Lowering the setting can make the actuator movement quieter, but the tradeoff is slower seek times and potentially reduced performance. It may help if the sound is normal seek noise, but it won’t fix a mechanically faulty drive.
The setup matters here: a drive in a PC, USB enclosure, or NAS can sound very different because of vibration and mounting. Since yours is a 7200 RPM model installed directly in a PC, louder seeking and vibration are plausible, especially during a large transfer. Still, unusually loud repeated knocking should be treated cautiously—check the drive’s SMART health and keep the original data backed up while you test it.
One thing to check is the filesystem or partition alignment and sector configuration. Very small allocation units probably aren’t ideal for a drive this large, though the noise is more likely related to normal head movement than the cluster size itself. If you do reformat, make sure you have a backup first and use sensible default alignment rather than changing settings blindly.
I formatted it with the graphical disk utility, so I didn’t manually choose those settings. The drive reports 512-byte logical sectors and 4096-byte physical sectors, and I was wondering whether I should recreate the partition with 4096-byte sectors.
It’s installed in a PC and runs at 7200 RPM. My other 20TB drive makes a similar sound, but this one is definitely louder.