Since it seems like everyone here uses Seagate Barracuda IV hard drives, I thought I'd relay a strange story about mine.
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<BR>I own three 40G Barracuda IV drives; each is in a separate system. The one disk failed and I sent it to Seagate and got a replacement. The replacement drive is MUCH noisier than any of the original three I had. The rotational noise is about the same, but, after the drive is on for 10 min, the seek noise is the loudest I've heard since this 540MB Quantum I had 7 years ago. I've been in touch with tech support at Seagate, and they've sent me two different DOS utilities that might help, but I've had no luck with them. On the plus side, tech support e-mails got back to me in less than 24 hours both times. It looks like I'll be sending the drive in for another replacement, since a) I want a quiet drive and b) strange noises are almost always a precursor to failure.
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<BR>Anyone else out there with a similar experience? Anyone have any idea why this one drive would be so much louder than any others (but not have any data corruption problems)?
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[addsig]
Noisy Barracuda IV?
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Got a replacement, sound level is back to normal
Well, I sent the drive in and got a replacement that is as quiet as the first three. I suppose that one was just a bad apple.
reply to teklan's problem
in reply to teklan:
I used to have the same problem. Contact Seagate via email and they will email you back a small DOS utility that you run once and it fixes the problem.
I used to have the same problem. Contact Seagate via email and they will email you back a small DOS utility that you run once and it fixes the problem.
teklan,
"I still don't know what it was"
The post that said to leave the drive on for 8+ hours also told you what the noise was:
"I still don't know what it was"
The post that said to leave the drive on for 8+ hours also told you what the noise was:
QueueThe noise you're hearing is most likely the offline scan feature, which activates in the first ~8 power-on hours. It should disappear after that.
Note that there are 8 scans, each with a duration of about an hour. If you set power-management spindown to <1 hour, the scan will restart at the beginning and never finish.