I have three new Seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs. They are working fine:

• I can write and read from them


• They are passing all the tests

The one issue I have is a worrying sound they emit when idle. The sound is a repetitive "tack tack ...", each tack being separated by about 0.5 sec. The "tack" is so strong that I can feel the vibration on my desk. Again, the drives work fine, if I copy a large file to those drives, the clicking sound disappears, it seems like the drives do not know how to be idle. The noise starts maybe 1 or 2 seconds after mounting the drive.

Here is what I've been through so far to try to solve the problem:

• Excessive head parking: The first explanation I found was that the power management on Ubuntu's side was causing excessive head parking, which could be solved via hdparm -B254 /dev/sda, but this command is not supported by my drive.

  
  



• Forcing drive to Idle with hdparm: I tried commands like hdparm -y /dev/sda, hdparm -S0 /dev/sda. Each time the clicking sound stops for a sec when registering the command and then immediately resumes.

  
  



• Deactivate SMART monitoring: I've found some record of drive monitoring causing some noise issue, so I deactivated it, without success.

  
  



• Upgrade firmware: I thought about upgrading the firmware but I already have the latest firmware it seems.

  
  



• Deactivate EPC / Idle_a / Idle_b: Using Seagate's tool called SeaChest, I can modify the power settings of a given drive. So far I've tried to disable the different idle modes, disable EPC, without success.

  
  

I have another smaller desktop with the same OS (Ubuntu 20.04), but a different Seagate drive (Seagate Exos instead of Seagate IronWolf). This other drive works as intended, so it seems the problem might be in the compatibility between Ubuntu and Ironwolf drives.

Any idea if this is a known issue and if there is a way to fix this? I can't believe this idle sound is a good thing for the drive.

EDIT 1:

I've reproduced the same behavior on Ubuntu 18, on the same system where my Seagate Exos is currently running smoothly.

I've added some rubber pads to the HDDs support frame and now I barely hear the sound. I'm still not entirely sure this is normal. I don't understand why the Seagate Exos is super silent but the IronWolf Pro aren't. I tried to contact Seagate, but I couldn't reach them for some reason.

EDIT 2:

I could still distinguish the periodic clicking noise so I ended up writing a stupid python script to keep writing stuff to disk:

import time



if __name__ == "__main__":

    while True:

        with open("./stupid_file.txt", "w") as fs:

            for _ in range(1000000):

                fs.write("This is the last time I'm buying an IronWolf HDD. 

")

                time.sleep(0.001)

Which I run where I've mounted my drive: python3 dumb_script.py

I can still hear some faint clicking but at least now it is not periodic... I'm still interested in case anyone can confirm this clicking is normal or not.

EDIT 3:

The clicking completely stopped, even without running the script. I have no idea why but all is fine now. Could it be just an initialization phase of the hard drive?

SOLUTION:

@Levente was right, this was due to the lazy init of ext4, see his answer for the solution.