I've been having this problem for a while, where my hard drives (and it's definitely the hard drives - when I unplug them, everything is fine) have been causing my case to vibrate and emit a constant, low frequency hum that can be clearly heard while wearing closed headphones.
Case is the HAF932, which I got used off Ebay.
Any ideas what is going on? Visually, nothing appears to be wrong. Tried asking on the Linus Tech Tips forum (link), but nobody could really help me there.
Cheers.
I actually had this same problem last night. I have 4 hard drives inside a Define R4 case. It would make an annoying hum when I get 2-3 feet away from it. Drove me nuts. I tried troubleshooting it last night by taking out the cpu fan that was missing their rubber dampeners on my Hyper 212, took out bottom case fan filter to rule out vibration from that, and made sure my fans were still good. It seems like all that helped get rid of the hum I was hearing which I thought was coming from my hard drives. But now instead of the hum... now I hear an annoying faint whine at night when computer is on. It just never ends!
My guess it's possible in your case to be vibrations coming from something other than the hard drives.
Are your HDD's mounted on some kind of a rubber thing (rubber washers or some other witchcraft)? if yes then I'd try to remove them and screw the HDD's properly in. To be honest I really don't like the rubbered suspensions for HDD's because it sort of swings the HDD in and it's riddeling the whole pc case. Also, not a fan of quick swap bays because of the same reason. If everything is as tight as possible without going over the top you should be fine.
I'm assuming that your HHD's are healthy.
It could also just be the HDD. My 1tb Western Digital Is a very vocal HDD, if you've ever heard a old 90's PC while its trying to load something big, yea thats what it sounds like. And I've ran every test I can find on it, everything says its fine.
you may want to defrag yours :D
it was just reformatted recently. Completely wiped clean.
As I said, it's definitely the hard drives - if I unplug them (I boot from an SSD either way), the vibrations go away. That said, yes, your issue sounds pretty much identical to mine, mosdef. (In fact, our hardware configs are very similar - 212, 4 hard drives - not that that's a factor. I had 2 hard drives a few weeks ago, and I still had vibrations.)
Will give the hard mount idea a shot; I have tried hard mounting with the rubber washer things still in place, and that didn't help.
Hard drives are healthy, and this is definitely not normal. I can feel it in the floor.
Make sure you side panels are fitting tight. If you can wiggle them a bit might be the cause. You can always mess with the clips. Bend this in just a hair to make a tighter fix. Be careful I am not responsible is you break your case.
It happens when the side panels are off, so I doubt that's the issue. Most of the vibration is, by touch, coming off the front of the case, closest to the drive cage.
Interesting to see this, mine are noisy as hell - I just assumed they are on the way out and will die any day. I've assumed that for a year or 2 though and still seems to boot up most of the time....
Two of my four drives are about a month or so old.
Tried the hard mount idea, and it's more or less exactly the same.