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Topic starter
I have two Tb 4 enclosures and built a 8TB RAID 1+0 yesterday. I ran verification and there were no errors.
I am hearing this regular knocking which sounds like the HDD are being accessed. A few seconds then a rising knocking sound then 1.25 seconds later a falling knocking sound. I checked activity on the drives:
lsof -w +c0 +D /Volumes/Godzilla | awk '{print $1, $2}' | sort -u | column -t
There was nothing accessing this RAID volume, so I decided to unmount the volume. The noise continues.
What is this sound and why is it happening. The forum doesn't allow .mp3 extension so I linked to file stored in dropbox:
I am thinking it's some process that WD Red Pro does to check or replace bad blocks? It's kinda driving me nuts
This topic was modified 3 years ago by johhnyjackhammer
Posted : 25/08/2023 12:10 pm
Topic starter
Would like to understand if this is the enclosure (board) that is causing the WD RED PRO drives to make this knocking sound or if this activity is the HDD themselves running some process? Where are the instructions coming from and what process is it?
I forgot to add that looking in SoftRAID while listening to this knocking sound I don't see the i/o requests go up on any of the drives. So it's not i/o that is causing this knocking sound.
I also just realized that I can't get these drives to spin down when the computer sleeps - they spin back up again. If the I keep the computer active and set "Put hdd to sleep when possible" to on, then they will spin down. I am on macOS.
Thanks
This post was modified 3 years ago by johhnyjackhammer
Posted : 25/08/2023 12:39 pm
FYI: the SoftRAID driver does not ever initiate IO, except for rebuilding. So any IO you are hearing is MacOS. My expectation would be indexing, first, but that should show IO counters incrementing.
Its possible this is diagnostic, but I am not familiar with such behavior. Since you are just setting up, prove to your self that this is the drives, by deleting the volumes and using Disk Utility to create volumes. then you know this is soemting between macOS and the drives.
The enclosures are completely passive, they cannot do anything.
Check with WD or the WD forums and see if you can get any help.
Sleep is another function of MacOS. There are many sleep bugs, I wish they would get fixed. Its especially annoying when you "zero out" disks, connect them to a Mac, let it sleep, and hear the drives spinning up every 45 minutes. Its an affectation of hibernation apparently.
Posted : 25/08/2023 1:39 pm
Topic starter
Thank you... I did find a page on wd.com. Apparently this is intentional to prevent the "media lube" from becoming viscous.
Like I said in the first post, there is no activity from the computer, no I/O at all. I even have SMART deactivated. The drives are also unmounted.
Normal Operating Noise and Helium Motors
There are times when an internal or external hard drive will emit sound during operation and the drive is functioning without issue. A whirring noise during drive spin-up when the computer is starting up, waking from sleep or the drive is transitioning from idle to full speed to resume normal operation can be normal. Other types of noises from a good drive include drive clicks every 4 or 5 seconds intervals and hard clicks during a head park operation during shutdown or entering sleep mode.
The noise heard is due to a feature used to prevent disturbances in media lube due to prolonged dwelling at a single location. This is common for HDD suppliers as a preventive activity for reliability. Normal operation typically forces seek away and the seek noises heard are expected. During moments of idle, there is less activity and the unexpected sound is more noticeable. Directly attaching the drive to a metal chassis can amplify this occurrence to make the hard drive more audible. Additionally, higher capacity internal drives use a helium filled motor base assembly technology that allows the drive to run cooler and deliver better overall performance. In comparison, lower capacity (non-helium) and higher capacity (helium) are louder than the lower capacity models. Random noise or clicking sounds can be expected for helium based drives.
Posted : 25/08/2023 1:43 pm
Back in the day, this problem was called "stiction". Many drives had this problem, where there was not enough power to spin up the drives. The drive manufacturers developed better lubrication, I did not know this was an issue any longer... interesting.
Posted : 25/08/2023 4:38 pm
I just installed 8x 10TB WD Red Pro drives in an OWC Thunderbay 8 with RAID5. The drives all make the strange sound in a synchronized pattern, every five seconds. It's driving me crazy. I described it to a friend as "the sound TARDIS circuits would make."
Apple has a 3m Thunderbolt 4 cable so maybe I'll stick it in a closet so I don't have to hear it all the time. I'm not satisfied with the WD media lube explanation, it shouldn't have to redistribute lube every 5 seconds. It seems like this is causing excessive wear and tear on the drive motors. Oh well, this is a brand new RAID cabinet on my first Apple Silicon box, I'll see if I can stabilize it.
Posted : 10/11/2023 6:15 pm
Seems to me if this is synchronized, it would not be the drives, as synchronization implies an external controller, ie, MacOS.
I do not think a "lubrication" claim makes sense either. If you learn more, feel free to post.
Posted : 11/11/2023 11:40 am
