Aren't SSD's supposed to be completely silent?

[kha7]

Hi Folks,

I was under the impression that a SSD operates completely silently (like a SD card).  I have a pretty new X220 with a 160 gb SSD (intel) and I keep hearing faint noises and an ocassional "whine" from the laptop similar to spindle hard disk noises.  Anyone experience that?  I do use it in a very quite environment though. Thanks.

[thinkfly]

It is quite normal to have the high-frequency noise. Usually it happens when I delete a large amount of files, and the M4 512GB, Samsung 830 512GB, Intel 320 Series 300GB all have this noise in my X220. The only exception is the Samsung 470 128GB though. As you can see, 3 out of 4 SSD's I used make the noise. Nothing to worry about.

[ccl13]

It's not noise from SSD. SSDs are generally completely silent. The sound is from CPU or supporting circuit of CPU. It happens when the CPU is doing loads, which usually accompanied by disk activities.

[jiv]

Are you sure its not the fan? It tends to whine a lot when the CPU is under load.

[ccl13]

Well yes it does whine more with CPU load.

The noise is very high pitched, maybe about 8000Hz or more. The fan will make a noise no higher than 3000Hz and much louder than this. It is very easy to be distinguished from the circuit noise. Plus, fan noise will not immediately change with the CPU load, because it will require at least around 10secs for the heat to be accumulated to be sensed by sensors.

Such high pitch noise is here from the first Dual Core laptop I have ever seen, so personally I think it is Intel's fault, or to be fair, a side effect. You can hear the same noise nearly on every laptop nowadays (Intel ones), but on some very lousy made ones the noise is nearly not there.

That's my experience and thought on it. I don't have official proof, but so far this is the most reasonable explanation.

[kha7]

Nope, Not the fan. It's the CPU as others have suggested. It's kinda of annoying actually.

[ccl13]

Yes I agree it is very annoying especially in deep night working alone.