HDD - annoying periodic noise during idle

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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ginahoy
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HDD - annoying periodic noise during idle

Post by ginahoy » Sun Aug 10, 2008 7:56 am

After attacking fan noise, noise from the hard drives becomes more pronounced. I have two Barracudas - a SATA (ST32500410AS) and an older ATA (ST3160023A). I eliminated vibration-induced noise by mounting the drives with rubber grommets and stand-off screws.

Unforunately, the ATA drive, used mostly for archival, makes an annoying periodic noise during idle (which is most of the time). Every few minutes it emits a repetitive pattern of clicks (click is too strong of a word) at a frequency of about 6 hertz. The pattern consists of 3 clicks followed by a space. This cadence continues for anywhere from 4 seconds up to a minute or so. Underlying this noise is a soft continuous sound that reminds me of the spinning sound made by a floppy disk during the seconds after a read or write operation completes. It begins at the same time as the pattern noise, but lasts a full minute, even if the pattern noise stops sooner.

Since I only use the drive for archival, I tried disabling it from Drive Properties / Hardware tab, but no joy. Best I can tell, all that does is make the drive invisible to Windows. The SATA drive is nearly silent when idle.

Does anyone know this noise? Is it normal? Is there anything that can be done about it? (BTW, the S.M.A.R.T. score for this drive is 96%).

David

Vicotnik
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Post by Vicotnik » Sun Aug 10, 2008 11:13 am

It's a common problem with Seagates in my experience. I don't know of any solution, besides replacing the drive with a non-Seagate.

jhhoffma
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Post by jhhoffma » Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:23 pm

I had an issue with a 300GB Seagate clicking every so often. I ended up putting it in another PC and I haven't noticed it since. It is suspended now however, but I don't know if that accounts for it.

subsonik
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Post by subsonik » Sun Aug 10, 2008 1:46 pm

Already 4 years ago, I started a thread on a dutch forum concerning this problem.

It seems that Seagate implements a periodic self-check in the disk's firmware. Every 7 minutes, it will check the first GB of the disk - this is where usually the operating system files are located.

Annoyingly, most Windows flavours seem to write something to the disk every few minutes. This interrupts the self-check - causing the disk's firmware to restart the self-check about a minute or two later. So you end up having self-check noises every 2 minutes instead of every 7 minutes :roll:

Disabling the drive in software won't help - the drive performs the self-check even when SATA is not connected. There is no real solution - buy no more Seagate. Or have some tool write a small file to your disk every minute.

By the way, I suspect WD has a similar feature - I've noticed similar behaviour on a WD 320GB model. The noise was a lot quieter than with the Seagates though.

Greg F.
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Post by Greg F. » Sun Aug 10, 2008 2:44 pm

"By the way, I suspect WD has a similar feature - I've noticed similar behaviour on a WD 320GB model. The noise was a lot quieter than with the Seagates though."

yes, I've been hearing something like this, too. WD 2500KS MOJBO. It is distracting.
But I think mine is something else that is more common and I just don't know enough about these things. When mine starts up it will freeze a playing video for a split second. That's different, isn't it?

ginahoy
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Post by ginahoy » Sun Aug 10, 2008 8:07 pm

subsonik wrote:Already 4 years ago, I started a thread on a dutch forum concerning this problem...
Thanks for the link. Apparently this noise is Seagate's STIR (Seek to increase Reliability) function. I noticed if I access the drive from Windows Explorer while the noise is happening, it stops immediately. So I'm going to try out the little StopNoise program you linked in the Dutch thread and see if that resolves the problem.

ginahoy
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Post by ginahoy » Sun Aug 10, 2008 8:48 pm

I downloaded StopNoise.exe and it works! Although I can now hear the periodic write operations (50-second interval seems to avert STIR on my drive), this is far preferable to the sound of STIR. As an added bonus, the drive temperature dropped 3 degrees C! This makes sense because the whole purpose of STIR was to keep the drive from overheating due to head hovering over one location. Periodic write operations apparently do a better job of keeping the drive cool. This should be useful information for silent PC enthusiasts!

BTW, I was looking at the 7200.7 specs and noticed my drive supports standby/sleep mode with only 0.9 watts of power (presumably this would disable STIR). This may be a stupid question, but is there any way to put a drive into standby mode without having my entire system go into standby? Remember, this is not my primary drive.

David

blackworx
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Post by blackworx » Sun Aug 10, 2008 11:59 pm

Wow. It all makes sense to me now! I had this problem with Seagates for years and always thought it was XP's boot optimisation causing the noise, since it seemed worse on a fresh install. But it still makes sense for it to be more noticeable at that time because a fresh install means little disk fragmentation, fewer startup and background processes => less disk activity => more disk idle time for this STIR function to kick in.

Well I'm glad I finally know what it was - and doubly glad I've switched to Samsung :lol:

ginahoy
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Post by ginahoy » Mon Aug 11, 2008 12:10 am

And that may also explain why I don't STIR on my primary drive. With write-back cache and who-knows-what-else Windows may be doing, it probably never goes a minute without being accessed, even when I'm not actively using the system.

BTW, how's the samsung in terms of noise?

David

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Post by frenchie » Wed Aug 13, 2008 11:03 pm

I have exactly the same problem with a barracuda 7200.9 !!! I'll try this tool tonight and see if it works for me. Like you said ginahoy, this is annoying !!!

blackworx
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Post by blackworx » Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:26 am

ginahoy wrote:how's the samsung in terms of noise?
I'm using 500GB Spinpoint drives (HD501LJ) and, although they're not massively quieter in absolute terms, the quality of the noise is much easier to tune out. Idle noise is slightly lower (although the age of my Seagates could have been a factor there). With seeks, I think the Samsungs' sound is much softer and "bouncy" in character, whereas my Seagates seemed quite hard and "clicky" in comparison. Mind you, I'm making this appraisal from memory, since I now have the Samsungs suspended and enclosed in foam so I can't hear them at all any more :wink:

The 80GB 'cuda was a revelation to me in terms of noise way back in 2003, but my impression is that Seagate have lost a lot of ground to WD and Samsung in recent years.

ginahoy
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Post by ginahoy » Fri Aug 22, 2008 9:52 am

Update:
STIR works pretty well, although for some unexplained reason, it doesn't completely eliminate STIR. However, I discovered an even better solution.

Recall the 7200.7 is my second drive, which I rarely use. I discovered that by setting Windows Power Options to "turn off the hard drives" after a designated period of inactivity, each drive is controlled separately, based on inactivity for THAT drive. Cool!

I set my drives to turn off after 3 minutes. As long as I'm using my computer, my primary drive remains active, which is OK because it's nearly silent. But my secondary drive spins down 3 minutes after I boot my machine. Whenever I need to access the drive, it only takes a few seconds to spin up. The best part is that drive only draws one-tenth as much power in standby (nominal is about 40C for this drive).

Note: I de-selected the drive in SpeedFan, otherwise the periodic probes would prevent the drive from turning off.

David

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