My Seagate 'pulses' - need a new drive

Lawrence Lee · Post by **Lawrence Lee** » Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:37 pm

I have a 80GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA as my boot drive. It works fine, loud during access, but what's bothering me the most is that it's got a good vibration to it. Sometimes the vibrations pulse in cycles.

Suspension is not an option, so I figured I get a new drive. Any suggestions? I need a SATA drive and prefer it to use a real SATA power connector (not molex)... I'm interested in the Maxtor DM10 200GB 16MB SATA drive, but it's not available in high enough quantities here in Canada.

Samsung, Maxtor, or WD? Has WD fixed their bearings yet? Haven't touched one since my Caviar SE's developed the infamous whine.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 4:43 am

If suspension is not an option then I DON'T recommend Samsung. They're generally considered to be amongst the quietest drives, but they do vibrate and this vibration will make noise when mounted in a normal case.

anthonysimilion · Post by **anthonysimilion** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:02 am

Supposedly, the new WD FDB drives (with 'SoftSeek' and 'WhisperDrive') are good performers, and relatively quiet as well.

Post by **Rusty075** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:15 am

Your mention of "pulsing in cycles", as well as your referring to the Seagate as "boot drive" suggests that what you've got going on there is harmonics between two or more hard drives, rather than one single noisy drive.

When multiple HDD's are rigidly attached to the same thin piece of steel, their slightly different vibratiing frequencies can setup a resonating periodic "hum" in the case.

A simple test would be to run the system with the seagate as the only drive and see if the hum goes away. Just unplugg whatever other HDD's you have.

Swapping the Seagate may or may not get rid of this, it may just change the frequency of the hum, or even make it louder. The surest solution is too add even a little decoupling between the drives and their mounting. There are solutions that will still let you mount them in their 3.5" bays while still getting at least some decoupling.

Lawrence Lee · Post by **Lawrence Lee** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 8:00 am

Thanks for your responses. That's an interesting theory about the harmonics, but it's very difficult for me to test. I need to keep downtime to a minimum as I run my rig 24-7 and a lot of my programs are on the other drives (I have 3 total, 80GB Seagate SATA 7200.7, 200GB Seagate 7200.7 ATA100, 200GB Maxtor DM9+ ATA133). The pulsing only happens once in awhile, it's not a constant thing. Sometimes I think I'm imagining it.

None of my 5.25" bays are free and I have E.A.R. rubber grommets on my hard drives. I thought I had done all I could - how would I decouple a drive within a 3.5" mount? I didn't know that was possible.

autoboy · Post by **autoboy** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 8:23 am

seagate drives have a self diagnostic cycle they perform sometimes. this is the noise that you hear. It bugged me too until i found out what it was. Now it is annoying but at least i know what it is.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 6:34 pm

What sort of case do you have?

The most innovative form of suspension I've seen was one where the drive cage itself was suspended. I can't recall how well that worked, but it seems interesting enough to try.

Mankey · Post by **Mankey** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 11:12 pm

i had the EXACT same pulsing noise that you are describing. I use 2 hard drives all the time. Suspending them solved the problem 100%. I can't imagine using my computer with that same pulsing noise again. Unless i wanted to gocrazy and kill my family with an axe.

Lawrence Lee · Post by **Lawrence Lee** » Mon Apr 11, 2005 11:27 pm

I have a Chenming style 21" tower with the two removable drive cages. I suppose I could suspend my boot drive as it's all by itself on the bottom cage. Suspend it underneath the cage. Or would I need to suspend them all?

==== (top/bottom of drive cage)
------- (empty space)

====
-------
HD#2
-------
HD#3
====
====
-------
-------
-------
x-----x
====
|HD#1| <-- suspension?

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 5:09 am

Found what I was thinking about. Look at Burcakb's Thor's Hammer.

It's one of the easiest ways to suspend multiple 3.5" drives.

Lawrence Lee · Post by **Lawrence Lee** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 8:48 am

Problem is the drive cages have platforms under them I would need to cut out to do that. I think I'll try to suspend the drive like this:

ilh · Post by **ilh** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 12:27 pm

If you have 3 drives, how do you know which is causing the problem? Which will you suspend?

halcyon · Post by **halcyon** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 6:35 am

I got decent isolation results with my 3,5" drive cages the following way:

I bended the side walls of the drive cage outwards so that I could fit a piece of soft rubber between the disk and the cage wall (both sides of the disk).

Then I used additional thick rubber grommets when using the screws to attach the drives to the cage.

This resulted in significant vibration/noise reduction, while still using the cages (and the airflow cage spots often provide). Also, as my machine is sometimes moved around, I can't have too fragile/mobile suspension system for the drives.

Beware that the results are not as good as with true suspension, but noise reduction was significant compared to bare installation inside drive cages.

Just FYI.

Viperoni · Post by **Viperoni** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 4:16 pm

I get a similar "pulsing"... to me it sounds like a high frequency squeal or whistle, only lasts for a second or two, but can keep on doing it for a while. I think it happens between accesses as well.

I believe I narrowed it down to my WD 250gb SE SATA, but I can't run that drive by itself to verify for sure. Currently it's sitting in a drive cage along with a 36gb Raptor, with the cage sitting on a block of foam inside the bottom from of the case (isolated from the case otherwise).