Is it ok that i hear my hard drive even tho it is not mounted?

hello
i’ve the latest manjaro with kde.
the os is installed on the ssd and i also have a hard drive.
even tho that my hard drive is not mounted i can hear it often with some of its noises. how could it be?
thank you

btw… i love manjaro very much

As long as it is connected to power, sometimes noise can be heard

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You could check and then set a spin down time:

https://superuser.com/questions/1362126/how-to-know-the-standby-time-of-a-disk-before-spinning-down

https://askubuntu.com/questions/39760/how-can-i-control-hdd-spin-down-time

It might be better for the drives longevity to leave it spun up all the time.
Spinning up a drive often might be harder on the mechanics than have it running all the time.
And: spinning up takes time - there can be quite a substantial lag when you do access it -
which can get annoying.

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Hi @candlightandskull,

That entirely depends on what you mean by “hear”.

If it’s normal, as in spinning up/down then that’s OK.

If it’s more noisy, probably not.

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The kernel may read the partition-table once, collecting informations , when processing fstab.
:footprints:

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If you hear the metallic sound of screws falling to the bottom of the computer case, that might be a fair indication something was afoot.

Otherwise, if a disk is connected and partitions mounted, there are very likely to be audible indicators, to some extent; if only as your system verifies its status.

Regards.

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It depends on which noises exactly you hear. A spinning hard disk — even without that any of the filesystems thereon are mounted — will still occasionally produce sound, for instance due to the self-alignment code in its firmware, which periodically checks whether the heads still accurately follow the cylinders, and if necessary, realigns them.

Another sound you may occasionally hear — both regularly and irregularly, and depending on the ambient temperature — could be a temporarily uncooperative roller bearing in the spindle motor.

If on the other hand you are hearing a constant and rhythmically repeating pattern of metallic sounds — for instance, a rhythmic click — then this would be indicative of the heads hitting the platters, in which case both the platters and the heads will have suffered damage and the drive should no longer be used.

That all said, as @Nachlese mentioned already, a hard disk drive that is being kept spinning at a constant rate 24/7 will suffer less wear and consume less power than one that is being spun up and down all the time, and for multiple reasons.

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If a hard drive is powered on it will generate a fixed frequency tone equivalent to the rotation speed of the drive platters
5400 rpm drive - 5400 Hz
7200 rpm drive - 7200 Hz

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I have a Seagate 16 TB in my NAS drive. If i power it down and up again, it sounds more like the hairdryer of my wife. Once the designated rotation speed is reached it’s surprisingly quiet… until you perform some write access.

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