Annoying HDD noise when playing 'big' games

[Hyplex]

Hello,

There's an annoying sound coming from the HDD while playing big games like Fallout 4 or The Division, probably a read/write noise similarly to doing an anti virus scan or something like that.. but it's extremely noisy, I can hear it through the headphones and I can barely stand it..

The noise stops when I'm looking through menus, only keeps going when im walking or running in the game.

[_I_]

might be coil whine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP73edpQwgc

can be caused by psu, gpu, or mobo vrms

[Hyplex]

It's not this type of noise, it's like fast clicking coming from the HDD I assume.

[Hyplex]

like this noise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J09pWNQPK7U&feature=related

[Obsessive Power]

I had a similar noise. Only happened in game, not so much in menu's and wasn't happening when only running Windows.

In my case it was my PSU. Replaced it and the noise has gone.

[Fluffy]

if it the same noise as the hard drive video more than likely the hdd.. they get louder with wear and age also some drives are louder than others ive got a wd raptor 10000rpm that makes more audible clicking noises than the seagate 7200rpm but its far from unbearable bigger games will require more read/write and make more noise.. i would get hd tune or some hard drive benchmark program and try that if its really loud its your hard drive just to rule out other possible noise causes

[10upN2DOWN]

Well copy/replace or lose it...your call

[_I_]

backup the hdd and replace it asap

[DEEP☯︎JINX]

Kind of late to the party lol I have the same issue with Destiny2. Only when in game, one of the two same hdd's make that noise. Have you solved/ found out what the issue actually is?

[WarBucks]

A clickity clack sound is not typically great.

You should run a chkdsk -f commandline from the root of the suspect drive to see if the drive has any "bad sectors". If there are I wouldnt even use the drive until you are ready to copy the data off.

If the chkdsk doesnt gave bad sectors then run defragment on the drive. Depending on how much it says its fragmented at the start youll know if fragmented data was the cause.

[Oz Gaming]

"A clickity clack sound is not typically great."

TRUE that. My second internal HDD (Not the one with Windows installed), started making that noise. Two weeks later it completely Failed and I had to buy a new one.

[[N]ebsun]

Clicking in a hdd is typically a sign it is about to fail.
Other reason could be highly fragmented data - defragging could help.

[Haruspex]

Some mechanical drives are just noisy. I have a 2TB WD Black drive that makes all kinds of noise. I've since pulled all mechanical drives from my machine and run only SSDs. Whisper quiet now, save for fan noise and a bit of coil whine when the GPU works hard.

[DEEP☯︎JINX]

Originally posted by WarBucks:

A clickity clack sound is not typically great.

You should run a chkdsk -f commandline from the root of the suspect drive to see if the drive has any "bad sectors". If there are I wouldnt even use the drive until you are ready to copy the data off.

If the chkdsk doesnt gave bad sectors then run defragment on the drive. Depending on how much it says its fragmented at the start youll know if fragmented data was the cause.

The system is over on the nvme but I got an ssd and 2, 2TB Seagate hdds. One of those make the noise. The noise isn't "clickity clack" but more of a steady buzz that you can barely hear over the pc coolers. It changes the 'pitch' when I go in and out of menus.

I check the fragmentation and is 0%. Also there are no bad sectors, health is 100% for both HDDs.

This is kind of a strange one because there aren't a lot of results for this type of 'issue' on the web- and I searched! Doesn't really bother me that much but I really want to know why is this happening because I don't keep any of the games on that HDD.

[Carlsberg]

If those hdd's have a pagefile on them disable it, run it from the boot ssd only.

[Illusion of Progress]

Your issue REALLY sounds like coil whine. I have never heard of a hard drive making a buzz that varies going in and out of menus when it's not even being used for said game (but even then this would be strange). That sounds like coil whine to the letter.

That said, if you have a pair of HDDs and have isolated the noise to one of them, it sounds like you're ensured the noise does come from the disk. I wouldn't know what it could be, if so. I would test this with the drive you think is the culprit disconnected to be sure though (if you haven't already) because I still have a suspicion as usually a faint noise you could describe as a buss/screech/whine/grind would be coil whine from the GPU, PSU, or sometimes motherboard (VRMs).