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.)