new WD black hard drive has strong vibration

[jlittle]

My new box uses an SSD, but I got a 1 TB WD Black hard drive with it, and today I've realised it is the source of the droning vibration that has been getting on my nerves. I hadn't even partitioned it, but today I did and copied some stuff to it, and it works ok. While in use there's no difference to the vibration.

This page WD help forum page suggests the vibration is "abnormal".

WD's own diagnostic utility "Data Lifeguard Diagnostics" only runs on windows. Is there anything I can run from Kubuntu?

[oshunluvr]

Do a few S.M.A.R.T. tests first. I've used this before:

http://whdd.org/get_it/

I assume you've checked the mounting? Maybe a rubber grommet or two will help. If it were mine and it's still under warranty, I'd get it replaced.

You don't mention the exact model of the drive, but I've have some older WD Blacks that I "upgraded" with newer firmware to raise them to Enterprise level, which changes some settings in the drives. The changes I made were related to running RAID on 2x1TB Blacks, but I no longer use RAID on them. I can say that they're sitting only a few feet away and I can't hear them spinning over the small cpu fan in my server box. However, they are mounted with full rubber insulation at all connection points.

[Rod J]

Try gnome-disk-utility. It's pretty good (it's a pity there isn't a KDE/Qt version). You can check most things you would want including running SMART tests. I happened to try the benchmark function earlier today which is pretty cool and gives a graphical performance indication of the drives performance.

Another tool I've used for years is gsmartcontrol. It is pretty comprehensive and you can see where any of the SMART attributes are failing or just beginning to go bad.

Mind you, I use these apps on older drives. Your new drive shouldn't be showing any signs of problems at such an early stage (at least one wouldn't think so).

I do have a problem with vibration in my system (I wish I had replaced the case when I re-built this PC a year ago). The old case is made of rather thin metal and resonates very easily. Sometimes it starts to vibrate and I just give the front of the case a tap and it stops it for a while.

Vibration does seem to be a problem with 3 1/2" drives though. The difference is really noticeable when you compare a 2 1/2" laptop drive which is so silent it's hard to tell if they are actually running.

[oshunluvr]

Probably obvious, but rotational speed has a lot to do with it. Sometimes, people get used to 5400RPM drives and are surprised by how much more noise comes from 7200RPM or higher. I agree with Rod's suggestions, I have used both those tools also and they're on my system now.

Assuming the hardware is OK, maybe spinning it down when not actually using it is possible. Also, believe it or not, many drives - my two WD Blacks included - support "acoustic" mode which can be adjusted by hdparm.

Issuing this command: sudo hdparm -M /dev/sdX should result in this: acoustic = 254 (128=quiet ... 254=fast)

Then by doing this: sudo hdparm -M 128 /dev/sdX you should now have a slightly quieter drive albeit slower also. I can't say with any confidence that this will reduce vibration. Too many possible causes and contributing factors.