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Anyone here ever had a PSU tick/crackle when under really low loads (and it's not the fan)? I have this HX520 that does that unless an HDD is being actively accessed or system load otherwise rises from idle, on a Core i3-6100 box acting as a NAS. I've sort-of-fixed the problem because since this is a home server, I turned off the HDD spindown timeout in Windows, which indirectly solved the problem. I'd still like to gather gerbils' opinions.

 I've read somewhere that "switching" power supplies exhibit this problem with really low loads, and I suppose that back in the 2007 age of 8800GTXs and the like, Corsair wasn't ever expecting a computer that would draw so little power.

Yes, the PSU may be old, but it's working okay and I'll probably die before it does. It was powering my main rig before with an i7-6700K (overclocked), and a GTX 970, and five HDDs + 1 SSD, plus a bunch of USB stuff.

I had one a while back (Silverstone, IIRC) that did that. Yes, it was annoying. I eventually pulled it and chucked it in the spares pile. Will probably re-use it the next time I'm building a server that I plan to stuff in the crawlspace.

Do you think that there's a problem, namely of the type "it's working now but it's about to blow up?"

TBH I don't know for sure. The system it was in never misbehaved (other than the ticking sound). IIRC I assumed at the time that it had something to do with the fan running at really low RPMs, but I never investigated further.

It would be worthwhile to isolate the fan and see if the noise is from there, or from the switching circuitry.  The only way I can imagine the circuit to be making a noise like that is either by cutting out periodically, or by a static discharge in the HV transformer.

A long time ago I had a PSU that did that (very steady tick tick tick every ~1/2 second), but I can't even remember what kind it was. Pretty sure I ended up swapping it out for my sanity's sake.

Well, as I said, the problem's "fixed" since I turned off HDD spindown. Just wanted to be reasonably convinced that it wasn't going to blow up on me.