I recently moved to a really quiet place, and I started noticing noises from my hdd, like prrrrprrrprrrprrrr like a cat (a kinda sick one) when there's activity.
The disks are a wd black caviar 1tb and and old 300gb wd, both do the same noise. But today I was cloning my system, and I used the disks on an old computer with an MSI board, i copied 300gb from one disk to the other and didn't hear a single sound.
So I though maybe the disks are spinning faster on this computer with gigabyte mobo. If they do, can they be slowed down in someway? I tried changing all the related settings I could find in the bios (like sata stuff), but didn't make a difference.
I also tried "hdparm -M" but it said the disk doesn't support it.
I am using Ubuntu 12.04, but also tried another systems and the noise is the same, even when POSTing sometimes it does some noise.