What does your Seagate 7200.8 drive sound like?

justlnluck · Post by **justlnluck** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:51 am

For those of you who own a SATA Seagate 7200.8 drive, I was wondering what type of idle noise you can hear.

My drive is quiet, but it still makes a subtle oscillating whine. It is not a huge deal, but I was used to my completely silent 160GB Samsung Spinpoint EIDE drive.

Do your Seagate drives make NO idle noise whatsoever, or do you also hear a subtle oscillating whine?

I also noticed that it makes a couple grinding/clicking noises every few minutes. It's like a buzz and ends with a click. Infact, I would have considered this to be a bad drive had I not already exchanged my drive for a new one.

I originally purchased a 250GB 7200.8 and it made the oscillating whine along with occassional grinding. I immediately returned the drive for an exchange. After a month of waiting, they sent me a 400GB 7200.8 "Seagate Certified Repaired" drive....hmmm.

So now I have a 400GB refurbished drive instead of a new 250GB that I originally purchased. I suppose I can live with the noise, but my computer is no longer silent like it once was. What noises do you guys hear from your Seagate drives? Anything like what I described? Thanks!

cotdt · Post by **cotdt** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 12:42 pm

It sounds louder than a helicopter from up close.

ion · Post by **ion** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:23 am

Mine does the same. It's my secondary/backup drive, so spends most of it's time idle. Here's the normal sound, which lasts for a few minutes:

http://www.uphere.co.uk/sounds/sata7200.normal.wma

And then I get about a minute of this:

http://www.uphere.co.uk/sounds/sata7200.noise.wma

It's not especially loud, but after two weeks, it's starting to drive me mad. It's going back today - agh there it is again...

justlnluck · Post by **justlnluck** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 10:14 am

I'm starting to think my refurbished hard drive is defective too.

I downloaded a trial version of active SMART
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/

The program keeps alerting me about the Raw Read Error Rate. The values fluctuate around 45 and 49. I looked up in the help file what these number mean, and it says:

This value depends of read errors, and disk surface condition and indicates a read retries rate. Lower values indicate that there is a problem with either disk surface or read/write heads.

My Samsung drive which I've owned for 2 years has a value of 100. I assume this is what the drives are supposed to display.

I would love to see comparison values from other Seagate 7200.8 owners. Let me know what you find. Thanks so much for any help!!

datapappan · Post by **datapappan** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 11:38 am

Seagate 80GB 7200 8MB cache

Raw Read Error Rate Value:60 Worst:56

No special sounds from the drive, its sitting on foam on case bottom.

/ datapappan

ion · Post by **ion** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:38 pm

justlnluck - what do you mean by 'double post'?

justlnluck · Post by **justlnluck** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:54 pm

Ion,

My post somehow got posted twice and I couldn't delete one of them, so I wrote double post instead. Sorry for the confusion

Ion, did you try using active smart to see what it says?

justlnluck · Post by **justlnluck** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:56 pm

Hi Datapappan,

When you say you hear no special sounds, do you mean that your hard drive is silent except for reading writing to the disk? Do you not hear an oscillating whine? Do you hear grinding every few seconds followed by clicks? (independent of reading/writing) What capacity is your drive?

soujir0u · Post by **soujir0u** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 4:06 pm

My 250GB IDE 7200.8 is the quitest hard drive I have owned (quieter than the Samsung 250GB SATA I just got, which has horrible seek noise). It's suspended with a NoVibes III, I can't hear the idle noise with the case cover closed and the seek noise is only barely audible in the middle of the night.

This is in an Antec 3700BLK with the rear case fan at 7V, Seasonic Super Tornado 400 and Panaflo L1A 80mm on the CPU heatsink at 7V.

As for what it sounds like, if I open up the case and listen up close the idle noise sounds like white noise, not high pitched but kind of a "whooshy" sound.

EDIT: Sorry, I just realised you were asking about the SATA version.

justlnluck · Post by **justlnluck** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 4:28 pm

Soujir, what values do you get with Active SMART for RAW Read Rate?

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 7:23 pm

justlnluck wrote:Soujir, what values do you get with Active SMART for RAW Read Rate?

I wouldn't worry about smart values for seagate. They always have much lower smart values than that of other drives, it's perfectly normal.

I have two 400Gb 7200.8

400Gb PATA
raw read error rate current: 48 worst: 46

400Gb SATA
raw read error rate current: 53 worst: 49

80Gb Barracuda VI
raw read error rate current: 73 worst: 63

Slidax · Post by **Slidax** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 4:53 am

hmm mine does make a bit of noise right up close but i cant hear it a couple metres away.

Zorander · Post by **Zorander** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 8:35 pm

Mine does make audible seek noise. Apart from that though, the drive is silent.

What does your Seagate 7200.8 drive sound like?

What does your Seagate 7200.8 drive sound like?

Seagate ATA 7200.8 Samples