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I just bought a Toshiba X300 8TB 7500r hard disk.

At first I used the whole disk as a partition, the noise is really intolerable.

Then I tried to use a small partition of 1TB or 2TB, the noise is much smaller.

But 4TB still produces a large noise.

Can anybody give me some hint? Why partition size affects noise level?

Thank you very much!

Update:

A more recent test shows that, the partition size may not be the key reason for the noise.

The noise is generated when the ext4 performs [ext4lazyinit] at a speed of 5MB/s.

After I remount the disk with init_itable=0 option, the [ext4lazyinit] can perform at a speed about 100MB/s, the noise is gone!

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2 Answers 2

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The linux default filesystem, ext4, spreads files as far apart as it can to help against fragmentation (so you don't need to defragment so often). The side effect is that your HDD heads will travel a lot. You could try another file system like exFAT if that's acceptable.

For more information, see Do ext4 filesystems need to be defragmented?

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  • Fragmentation & Noise !
    – C0deDaedalus
    Jun 8, 2018 at 7:18
  • @C0deDaedalus that would be applicable to Windows (or specifically NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, etc.. smart filesystems don't have this problem as often, as in my own experience, a file server that I used to manage on Windows server had 99% fragmentation and performance was a disaster). But the smart file systems do make the heads move around a lot which can make you think that your disk is fragmented, but it's not the case.
    – Gizmo
    Jun 8, 2018 at 7:24
  • Hmmmmm. I got it - smart filesystem B-)
    – C0deDaedalus
    Jun 8, 2018 at 7:31
  • Is there any parameter to control how far apart? There should be a threshold for a specific brand and size, if the space is large than the threshold, noise will be unavoidable.
    – Vimos
    Jun 8, 2018 at 8:00
  • @Vimos don't quote me on it but by looking at kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt , the mb_max_to_scan and mb_min_to_scan parameters would be something that look like they do that. I'm no expert in this field so be careful. I would set min to 0 and max to something much smaller than your current system has (10x lower or 100x lower).
    – Gizmo
    Jun 8, 2018 at 10:24
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I had a clicking (every second) sound with my new 6TB Toshiba NAS drives for a Debian homeserver I made. I was afraid it would damage the drives on long term. It still continued when I installed a delock raid1 controller. I have worked on it for a week trying all kind of configurations/new installations and HDparm settings, but nothing worked. My system partition was 100gb ext4 and I had a home partition of 5.5TB ext4. The clicking dissapeared after I changed the 5.5TB partition from ext4 to XFS. The drives are a bit noisy anyway, can hear them when I log in from another system, but I assume it is okay since NAS drives are a bit louder.

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