Are these sounds normal for a Seagate ST8000NM000A Exos 8TB HDD

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

Good Day all,
I’m new to using a Seagate Exos drive.
I am wondering if anybody has experience with the following hard drive
Seagate ST8000NM000A Exos 8TB HDD and can offer some advise.
I needed to upgrade my “Files Archive” hard drive to to a bigger drive, so I though that if I get an “Enterprise” HDD like the exos, that My files will be safer on an “Enterprise” drive.

When I installed it into my pc (HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8), it Immediately started making clicking and scratching noises, then quieted down when the pc was up and running.
I followed up with running a CrystalDiskMark test to see if the noises continued. And it did.

Unfortunately I can’t upload attachments or add links to my post.
So I don’t know how to supply everyone with an audio clip of the sounds.

When I have heard the loud “click then Scratch” noise in the passed, the hard drive would start failing very soon after.

The CrystalDiskMark results seemed all good and no S.M.A.R.T errors are found. But the noise worries me.

Is this HDD faulty or is this the normal noise for “Enterprise” HDDs.

Thank you.

2

It’s probably normal. Exos drives (and enterprise drives in general) are known to be noisy. There are some clips on youtube you could compare with.

Doing a long self-test and a run of badblocks is never a bad idea on a new drive of course, to make there’s no damage from shipping or so.

2 Likes
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Wow thank you very much, I am defiantly very naive when it comes to these drives. I honestly thought that being “Enterprise” grade that it would be quieter then “commercial” grade. Thank you very much. I have definitely learned something new today.

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Enterprise drives are typically in a datacenter where noise isn’t an issue. I have a pair of HPE Gen10 Microservers and populated each unit with 4 SSD in the drive slots RAID 5. I have them behind my TV and they are as quiet as a church.

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Protip: Get tinnitus so that background noise soothes your soul

don’t actually do this, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I love moderate amounts of fan and HDD noise for this reason

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Hahah, luckily I have the PC in a far corner of my my study room / office and it only gets turned on at night to do backups. Otherwise I would go mental :rofl:

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For me that is what was the big surprise, I use a 250GB SSD as the main boot drive / OS. Then 3x 3TB Seagate barracuda drives for storing files and it was dead silent. Now as I am trying to slowly upgrade the drives, I didn’t expect the noise level to be so different.

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I have the 10TB model Exos and it is gloriously loud. The spindle whine and thumping of the seek head is quite audible. I admit I’m probably in the minority that likes hard drive sounds…

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How else are you supposed to know it is working.

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