WD Caviar Black noisy?

The Caviar Blacks aren't known for their utter silence and reviews have commented on that.

If you're downloading or something and you're hearing it writing perhaps once every second, that's normal. For that matter it could be doing the search indexing that's normal after fresh installs (assuming you didn't disable it).

Sort of depends on if you're truly hearing "clicking" or just the normal writing / activity sound.

Don't know that an immediate RMA is necessary. You might give it another day or two and see if it's indeed something like search indexing that just needs to die down.

WD's are noisy, although the latest models show some improvement.

But no matter how much noise it makes, clicks are a bad sign.
They are not normal operating sounds.

Like I stated, it might run for months with the clicks getting more frequent,
although it's more likely to end very soon.

Good luck

Christopher said:

I suppose that it is closer to a grind noise, rather than a definitive "click."

Like normal, or at least I think normal, HD grind noise ... I am just surprised because I didn't here it before. Perhaps it is my indexing, I do recall having it disabled before, but I haven't on this system ... could that be the cause???

Nope.

It is like it is. Clicks don't belong to normal operation sounds.

Grinding, rattling, purring like a kitten, even a high pitch tone are all common sounds.
(although not all disks make all these mentioned sounds)

The sounds that tell you the disk is in trouble are:

clicks: head-arm controller malfunctions briefly.
By it's self not a problem, but it briefly loses control of the arm and smashes it into the left side of the disk, which eventually will lead to damage to the arm.
A twist or bend of a few microns is enough to cause a head crash.

A pattern of repetitive little burst of purring noise:
Normally the purring is random and continues during drive operation.
When you detect a pattern, that's bad news.
It means there are a cluster of bad sectors, and they are in a place the drive wants to access.
The drive is trying to read it over and over again.
If you are lucky they will be marked as bad, and not accessed again.
But you should realize that if the sectors are physically damaged there might be surface particles flying around, that when they come in contact with the head will ultimately lead to disaster.


Awful squeak, like nails on a blackboard:
This tells you particles indeed have come in contact with the head and it is scratching your disk.
More and more particles are scraped off the surface.
When this happens it's often to late to rescue all the data.
Don't shutdown the PC!! , and try to save what you can to another disk.

The reason you shouldn't boot when this happens, is that the damage might be at some sectors that contain files necessary to boot the OS.

I will try to create the different sounds and make a tutorial about this.

Good luck.