What is this sound my 0% hard drive(s) are making and how do I stop it?

Understanding Unusual Hard Drive Noises: Causes and Troubleshooting Tips

Introduction

Experiencing unexpected sounds from your storage devices can be concerning, especially if your drives are showing minimal or zero activity in system monitors. If you’ve recently reinstalled Windows after hardware upgrades and notice your hard drives emitting frequent noises despite low usage, you’re not alone. This article explores common causes of such sounds, how to diagnose them, and possible solutions to ensure your drives operate smoothly.

Recognizing the Issue

Users often observe their drives making repetitive clicking, grinding, or whirring sounds, even when task managers report 0% disk usage. Such noises can be alarming, prompting questions about drive health and performance.

Case Overview

Consider a scenario where a user notices their newly installed system’s hard drives emitting persistent noises. The drives are confirmed to be performing minimal reads/writes—approximately 50GB of data out of 20TB—yet they continue to produce sounds. Diagnostic tools like CrystalDiskInfo and HWINFO64 indicate that the drives are SMART healthy, and typical background processes like page files and indexing have been disabled.

Possible Causes

1. Mechanical Movements and Drive Idle Behavior:
   Even when not actively used, drives may perform routine background operations such as park/unpark cycles or seek calibrations, which can produce noise.

2. Power Management Settings:
   Power saving features may cause the disk to spin down and spin up periodically, leading to repetitive sounds even if the drive appears idle.

3. Firmware or Driver Interactions:
   Certain firmware or driver issues can cause drives to behave unexpectedly, including unnecessary seeking or parking.

4. Physical Factors:
   Although less common in new hardware, physical issues like loose connectors or mounting vibrations can generate noise.

Troubleshooting and Solutions

1. Verify Drive Health:
   Continue monitoring via SMART tools to ensure no impending failure indicators. Since diagnostics report ‘OK’, hardware failure is less likely.

2. Adjust Power Management Settings:
   You’ve already set the “turn off hard disk after” time to 1 minute, which is a good step. Consider disabling “selective suspend” for disks or exploring advanced power options to prevent frequent spin-downs.

3. Check for Firmware Updates:
   Visit your drive manufacturer’s website to see if firmware updates are available, as these can resolve issues related to noise and erratic behavior.

4. Disable Unnecessary Background Tasks:
   Make sure no other processes are causing disk