Hard Disk Noise and Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB

I bought two Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB hard drives recently for my home nas. They’re considered great drives for 24/7 operation. I’m using them as mirrored ZFS drives in FreeBSD. One thing that took me by surprise was the noise of the disk! The first time I installed them and I was running them on a desk (yeah, too excited to place them in the case), outside the case, the noise was startling. I thought the disks were bad. I had to repeatedly run smartmontools to check that they were good and that the ZFS pools had no errors. The seeks are pretty loud and unsettling and the writes are noisy as well. Since then, I’ve properly installed them into the case and kept teh case about a metre away and I’ve perhaps gotten used to it. I’ll probably move it out but if you have a lot of continuous disk operations during the day at your office, you’d really have to get used to the noise.

A month in, ten TBs or reads/writes and they’re happily chugging along.

camcontrol devlist output: ST12000NT001-3MD101 EN01

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