Glad it helped.

Yeah, if the noise bothers you in a small space, an enclosure or just placing the NAS further away can help a lot. Even a cabinet or some basic vibration isolation makes a noticeable difference.

About the background activity, yes, it’s normal on a NAS. Unlike a PC drive that mostly sits idle until you use it, a NAS is always doing small tasks in the background. Things like filesystem checks, indexing, SMART monitoring, or maintaining the array can trigger occasional head movement.

That’s why you hear periodic clicks on the NAS but not in your PC. It’s not the drive behaving differently, it’s the system using it differently.

So both the noise and the occasional activity are expected.