When HDDs spin, they create vibrations and vibrations from an HDD sitting on a desk may cause other objects on the desk, or even the desk itself, to emit a sound. These can also produce sounds which can be more noticeable in warmer environments where the fan will kick in sooner and more often – this sounds like the HDD whirring mentioned above.

Some external drive enclosures have internal fans, especially devices with multiple hard drives. The HDD’s heads, which read and write the data, are constantly making rapid movements as well – this usually sounds like an occasional soft click during use but can sound like a hard click when the heads get parked, for example during shutdown or when entering sleep mode.

While an HDD is reading or writing data, the disk’s platters are spinning rapidly – this typically emits a whirring sound and can be more pronounced when an HDD is winding up or down. Even if not actively being accessed by a user, hard drives are often used by the computer in the background, for example, during automatic indexing.

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