WD Elements 2 TB Loudness/Noise

Hi, I have recently purchased a WD Elements 2 TB external hard drive. It works fine and has decent performance for an external drive, but it is insanely loud. It’s louder than the drive in my old laptop, and that one is as bad as it gets. It’s also way louder than my internal Western Digital Blue 7200 RPM drives. Sure, they’re in a case and a bit further away, but even if I open up the case and put my ear directly besides them while writing on them with 100 MiB/s they’re still quieter than the WD Elements from a meter away. And I don’t mean like a clicking or scratching noise that’d indicate drive failure, it’s literally just the drive spinning, it almost sounds like having bad CPU fan on the desk going crazy, and this drive doesn’t even have a fan (afaik).

Is this like… normal? It’s extremely annoying to me and I just want to know that when I send it back, should I try to get a different WD Elements 2 TB (because apparently WD puts different HDDs in these) or should I just try a Seagate drive? Are the MyPassport versions quieter? (I don’t care for hardware encryption or WDs backup software, so I expected the Elements to be the right choice for me.)

Does not sound normal at all … (take a video and post it on youtube if you can)

i have 2x 3TB WD Elements and 1x 4TB WD Elements … all of them make a normal quiet whirring sound

have a 3x 1TB WD Elements SE and 1x 2TB WD Elements Portable drives as well … very quite, can barely hear them at.

Sounds like you got a faulty one (it can happen) … i remember years ago had a similar problem, returned it next day and exchanged it with the same brand and type … and it worked fine.

(i guess the staff at the shop were playing football with the first one i bought from a retail store) :wink:

I can’t really make a YouTube video but I was able to make a recording, this is the sound compared to me typing on mx brown switches, and disabling the drive in the end. Vocaroo | Online voice recorder Like I said, it doesn’t sound broken to me, it’s a clean whirring sound, but it’s really loud even compared to the whirring of a laptop drive.