I worked for a fledgling consultancy in 1995, and we spent a small fortune on a 4GB drive for the network server (which was HUGE in those days - in my previous role the entire IT department of 20-ish people had a 4GB shared network space to work off, which was plenty. Having that on a single drive in a single box was cutting-edge!). The drive took ~5s to spin up, and made this incredible "vvvvvvmmmmm" noise as it did so, as the inertia of god-know-how-many disk platters was overcome by the motor. Once running, the machine then took another 30s+ to actually boot up into Windows NT, making clunking and whirring noises all the time.
Booting this monster up was the morning ritual, together with getting the coffee machine brewing and opening the blinds. Sometimes I hear a similar sound of an electric motor fighting inertia, and it always takes me back to those days.
Or you could get a secondary mechanical HDD :-P. Last year i got a 18TB mechanical HDD for extra storage in my desktop and the noises it makes are like as if the platter is made of stone and the headers are digging it to store the data :-P. After 10+ years of using only SSDs - and the HDD being quite more noisier than the HDDs i used for most of the late 2000s - the clonky mechanical sounds were outright nostalgic.
Some "new" hdds are absolutely insanely loud.. I got some recently where having 3 in an otherwise quiet case made them very audible from the other end of the house! I sent them back.
Looking at the datasets for the WD Red Pro for example, there's idle/peak dBa from 34/38 for the 10TB to 20/32 for the 20TB
34 dBa idle. Are you kidding me?
I ended up settling on the 18TB btw, as that's all there was at the time, 20/36 dBa.. and quite happy with them, and they're "normal loud". Noticable sitting next to the pc, more so when active, but not from more than a few metres away - and ZFS doing a scrub no longer sounds like a an industrial accident either, so thats nice.
Most hard drives have a very little known feature called “Advanced Acoustic Management” that allows you to inform the firmware of the drive that you want to prioritize noise over seek speed, and it will gently accelerate and decelerate the moving heads.
Enterprise-oriented HDDs (which I assume includes your 18TB one) are a lot noisier than their desktop counterparts. I'd expect that e.g. a 3TB WD Blue would be virtually inaudible compared to your drive.
Yeah it is a datacenter HDD and noise isn't much of an issue there i assume. I have a couple of other systems with mechanical HDDs that are barely audible, but they aren't 18TB either :-P.
I bought that one because it was big, relatively cheap and read on /r/DataHoarder that datacenter HDDs are slightly less likely to have issues (not sure how realistic vs superstition that might be though, main reason i got it was because it was big).
I don't even care about the noise but I would want a mechanical drive because I suspect it will last longer. Most of my hard drives from the early 90s still work. When they fail, they fail gracefully--just mark a few sectors as bad, maybe replace a part of the head. I view most non-mechanical hard drives these days the same as cd-roms, usb sticks, etc., they can't be relied on for long-term storage.
I recall once noticing that my hard drive was acting a little funny. Every few seconds, it would do a little work and flash my HDD light. This was an ancient version of Windows, and I wasn't running anything fancy in the background.
Yup. I remember once with my desktop trying to figure out why it took like 10 seconds to access the D drive. I listened and could hear it trying repeatedly to whir up before it finally did. I don’t miss the tech but I miss the ambience.
