Hello. I had purchased an external 2TB Seagate Expansion Drive back in January of 2021. It always showed 100% health in HD Sentinel and had no issues whatsoever, up until about a week ago (Oct 6th) where it seemed to have failed while I was out for a few hours. I immediately started to save what I could to another PC (which was fortunately more than 80% of my files) and went to buy another drive to replace it.
It boiled down to 2 options:
After reading some forum posts and product reviews, I, somewhat hurriedly as I needed a new drive, gave Seagate another try and ordered the Barracuda 2TB drive. When I got to the store to get it a couple days later I noticed it only came in a anti-static bag, so I asked the employee to wrap it in a more protective material as I wanted to be sure it would be protected while I was returning home, which they did.
After returning home and installing it I turned my PC on and I immediately noticed a noise coming from the new Barracuda drive, - it was the head "unlocking" from the ramp and getting on the platters after spinning up.
Worried that the drive might be DOA, I ran a bunch of tests on it:
Now, to be fair, I did not expect it to be 100% silent. It's a mechanical HDD after all, of course it will make some noise. However, it's the specific type of noise that concerns me, as I've only heard it on old or failing drives, including the previous Expansion drive which started making noises right after failure and especially on shutdowns. This alone tempts me to return it and get the WD Blue drive instead if possible, for which I haven't found any review stating anything about noise (except any DOA drives) and I think comes in it's own box. Nevertheless, I think it might just be me being overly anxious for nothing at the end of the day and that I should trust the test results and stick with the Seagate Barracuda drive.
Is the noise (and/or packaging) of the Seagate drive something to worry about or not?
(Note: To answer some more questions which I'm sure you'll have: yes, I'll be buying another drive for taking backups and I'll update the post with HD Sentinel's write-read surface test results when it finishes.)
It boiled down to 2 options:
- Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM008, 7200 RPM w/ 256MB cache
- Western Digital Blue 2TB WD20EZAZ, 7200 RPM w/ 256MB cache (product page on store says 7200 RPM, but it might actually be 5400RPM since that's what WD states in their product brief paper)
After reading some forum posts and product reviews, I, somewhat hurriedly as I needed a new drive, gave Seagate another try and ordered the Barracuda 2TB drive. When I got to the store to get it a couple days later I noticed it only came in a anti-static bag, so I asked the employee to wrap it in a more protective material as I wanted to be sure it would be protected while I was returning home, which they did.
After returning home and installing it I turned my PC on and I immediately noticed a noise coming from the new Barracuda drive, - it was the head "unlocking" from the ramp and getting on the platters after spinning up.
Worried that the drive might be DOA, I ran a bunch of tests on it:
- 2x h2testw's read/write verification test (for 1 out of 2 TB as I didn't want to completely fill the drive up),
- 3x HD Tune Pro's surface test (but only for 80% of the disk as I used the trial version),
- 2x HDDScan's surface & butterfly tests (for the full disk surface this time),
- 2x short & 2x extended SMART tests using Seagate's SeaTools (the extended tests took about 4h 30min each),
- 1x HD Sentinel's surface read test & write-read surface test (the latter is running as I'm typing this).
Now, to be fair, I did not expect it to be 100% silent. It's a mechanical HDD after all, of course it will make some noise. However, it's the specific type of noise that concerns me, as I've only heard it on old or failing drives, including the previous Expansion drive which started making noises right after failure and especially on shutdowns. This alone tempts me to return it and get the WD Blue drive instead if possible, for which I haven't found any review stating anything about noise (except any DOA drives) and I think comes in it's own box. Nevertheless, I think it might just be me being overly anxious for nothing at the end of the day and that I should trust the test results and stick with the Seagate Barracuda drive.
Is the noise (and/or packaging) of the Seagate drive something to worry about or not?
(Note: To answer some more questions which I'm sure you'll have: yes, I'll be buying another drive for taking backups and I'll update the post with HD Sentinel's write-read surface test results when it finishes.)
