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My HDD that seems not be writing anything is giving a low, continous, repetitive, systematic noise pattern. It's so low I can only hear it at night. It goes away after some time. Comes several times a night.

I'm pretty sure it's the HDD since, well, it has a very HDD-like sound, like it's doing some low-noise diagnostics or something. Also, my computer is pretty silent otherwise, and I'm not doing anything CPU heavy, my utilization at these times is <10%.

edit I think the drive is 'idle' because if I do anything non-cached the sound disrupts, however if I only do cached reads it's not. But I've also done some copies of small files I've recently edited and the noise didn't go away. Still, it always go away if I enter a directory what I didn't visit since startup.

But spinning up or writing are usually very different and more noisy from what I hear, because they are not that repetitive. The one I hear is cyclic, after some time it dies off. I've run handle as administrator on the singular and non-system partition the HDD has, E: (my only other drive C: is an SSD):

C:\Users\-->handle e:

Handle v3.46
Copyright (C) 1997-2011 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

System             pid: 4      type: File            50: E:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLogContainer00000000000000000001
System             pid: 4      type: File            6C: E:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLogContainer00000000000000000002
System             pid: 4      type: File           108: E:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$Txf
System             pid: 4      type: File           130: E:\$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$TxfLog.blf
System             pid: 4      type: File           D54: E:
svchost.exe        pid: 940    type: File           31C: E:
svchost.exe        pid: 940    type: File           43C: E:\System Volume Information\tracking.log
svchost.exe        pid: 940    type: File           44C: E:\$Extend\$ObjId
svchost.exe        pid: 2884   type: File           490: E:\--\handle.exe
svchost.exe        pid: 2884   type: File           6A8: E:\--\handle.exe

edit not a proof, but I usually assume that no write happens when I hear the strange repetitive noise. I sometimes hear the drive spin up after I hear the strange noise (usually after I access some non-cached directory), and the sound of writing large files is very different (not this repetitive and systematic but fairly random).

What could be the origin of this sound?

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  • have you called the hard drive manufacturer and asked them for their opinion? they have technicians no doubt that know their hard drives, some may know them very well.. ideal thing is if they can lead you to triggering it, and prove what it is
    – barlop
    Nov 29, 2013 at 19:30
  • @barlop haven't done that yet. Not sure if they have availability in my country, should check.
    – n611x007
    Nov 29, 2013 at 21:09
  • call the american number
    – barlop
    Nov 29, 2013 at 21:20

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After asking I suddenly realized the suspicion that it may be some seeking noise. I could only find this trial/shareware program HD Tune Pro to test it (no affiliation; but the free version has no tests).

It has separate tests containing seek tests in the "extra tests" tab. I've tried all of them one by one. The sound I hear seems to be tested by Sequential outer / Read - only my does it longer than the test. (I don't know practically anything about HDD hardware yet so I'm not sure what does this test do.) Why my system does this on its own is a question that remains. :)

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