HD Squeal Every Ten Minutes 1

[Tommy55]

Hi,

I'm hoping that someone here can help me.

I recently installed a Hitachi Deskstar 120GB 7200rpm hard disk as a slave to my existing 80GB drive. They're both on as Cable Select and the new one was recognised, it's been assigned a drive letter and works fine. I've saved to it successfully.

However, every ten minutes, WITHOUT FAIL, the drive lets out a whirring/squealing noise for between 3-5 seconds. It happens every ten minutes almost to the second. I actually kept a log in a text file of it happening. I rebooted and it did it again. Again, ten minutes apart I got the noise.

Does anyone have any idea what this could be? Like I said the drive is recognised fine, works and I can save to it. Although, I tried to run the Hard Drive Fitness Test that I got from the Hitachi site, but when I tried both the Quick and Advanced test, they both say "Device Not Found". I click Start, it flashes up that mouse is disabled, then says mouse enabled then the message that it's not found. Is this related or something completely different?

I took the drive back to the shop where I purchased it and they are looking at it. However, from their perspective, they may just say - the drive works. That's that. But there's no way I'll keep my sanity with a drive that lets off a really audible squeal every ten minutes.

I'm not much of a hardware person, so any advice, hints or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

Tommy

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

since the drive is under warranty just have them replace it..sounds like it is on the way out

 

[VMPhilosophy]

IBM/Hitatchi deskstar and western digital drives have been nototious of late for going bad real fast. a squeal or slightly high pitched noise in intervals usually indicate that the drive is having trouble keeping power, i would take the hitatchi drive back and get a seagate or if you have to a Maxtor. i dont trust hitatchi/IBM or western digital drives anymore.

"Did you ever wish a circle was a square, so when land sharks start circling the boarders you can just cut them off at the corners?" - Aesop Rock

 

[Tommy55]

Thanks for the replies. I just took it back to the place I bought it and they exchanged it for another one. I decided against getting another Deskstar and opted for the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB.

Installed it and it seems to be running okay so far. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Tommy55]

UPDATE:

With the new hard drive (the Maxtor), I'm getting a less annoying, but still noticeable noise..something like a purr and a click...it doesn't sound too serious - like the noise you'd expect when it was about to fail. Like I said it's fairly quiet and if I was writing to the drive I wouldn't be worried, but it's the fact I'm not reading or writing to the drive at the time.

Is this normal? Could it just be a Windows thing, reading the drive or something? There are no files on that drive. It's just weird that it's also happening almost like clockwork.

My original (primary) hard drive purrs away while I'm working and I'm not bothered by this. It just seems wrong that this drive should let off a noise every 5 minutes, for seemingly no reason.

Now I'm really confused. Once again, any info would be most appreciated.

 

[VMPhilosophy]

Purring is normal but a click is not. something is wrong if you hear a clicking sound (usually the sound of the read arm slamming against the wall) if you have a small spare junk hard drive i would try that out in the place of the diamond max just as a test. the diamond max also should have come with a diagnostic disk. try running that on the maxtor. The chances of purchasing 2 bad drives in a row are slim but indeed possible. however at this point maxtor drives have a better track record than hitatchi. the store in which i work stopped selling them because they kept coming back bad.

"Did you ever wish a circle was a square, so when land sharks start circling the boarders you can just cut them off at the corners?" - Aesop Rock

 

[Tommy55]

Thanks again for the insight, I really appreciate it. It could just be me describing the noise badly. It's sort of like a 'soft click-purr-purr-soft click' type thing. It might be something normal that I'm misinterpreting for a problem due to my problems with the Hitachi. Also - I should mention that I'm purposefully listening out for it - not typing, sound down in the room etc. (This is what's allowed me to figure out that it seems to happen every 5 minutes.)

Is there anything that it would be doing every 5 minutes to check, that would cause activity on the drive? As I said, I'm not consciously accessing anything on that disk. In fact, there's nothing there, except for a few empty folders.

I'm only using the drive as media storage for digital video and sound from a camcorder. I think I'll run it for a few weeks, and see how it goes. It's under warranty for a year and the shop I bought it from were quite helpful.

Again, it could just be misplaced paranoia on my part - but I'm still slightly concerned as I don't know why it should be making any noises.

 

[VMPhilosophy]

if you have any auto back up or hard drive monitoring utilities such as go back or norton system works you will get some hard drive activity even when you dont access the hard drive.

"Did you ever wish a circle was a square, so when land sharks start circling the boarders you can just cut them off at the corners?" - Aesop Rock

 

[Tommy55]

I've had the systems engineers in my work look at the drive. They can't see anything out of the ordinary. Although, I couldn't replicate the repeated, 5 minute cycle of click-purr-purr-click. They dumped a couple of hundred MB of data on it, listened to it and it seemed fine.

So...the drive has now been recognised in two different machines and seemed to work. I've also ran Maxtor's drive testing download against the hard disk - all these tests came back saying that the drive was okay.

I'm now guessing that it must be an application I have on my machine that's causing the noise. Possibly Norton AntiVirus? I've been advised that it could be the real time monitoring.

I'll report back any findings.

 

[bcastner]

You should also be aware that Maxtor, and some others, have a testing cycle that is enabled in BIOS when the drive is new and lasts for some 70+ power-on cycles of the drive.

It may be that the drive was/is still in a S.M.A.R.T. testing cycle until you reach the power-on cycle threshold.

 

[Dreamland]

bcastner -

Do you happen to have a reference for this? I'm not questioning it by any means, I just read this more than once before (I recall a smaller number of spin-ups). Maxtor is useless for the information of course, unless you're buying a few K of their drives and the other manufacturers are equally as tight-lipped about their setup. It's impossible to find anyting but the briefest of details on how each manufacturer does this.

The reason I'm wondering goes back to the DeskStar 75GXP debacle. There was a lot of discussion about turning off SMART on the BIOS to save your drive. It started turning up on the BIOS menus of new motherboards around then and was ON by default in early versions. Lots of people said that disabling it in the BIOS made no difference (no other SMART software installed, of course). They could still hear the drive regularly scan across the disk and update the PFA log, but this behavior would stop after some time (weeks?). Other people swore that disabling SMART in the BIOS made it stop right away. This would at least explain why it wouldn't work for some people.

[Tommy55 - the S.M.A.R.T. functions (not all disk-related) were suppose to include an industry-wide adoption of IBM's drive predictive failure analysis (PFA) by all disk manufacturers. The PFA was sort of a built-in self-monitoring drive program - a combination of thermal recalibration, event logging and drive fitness testing. It's pre-programmed by the manufacturers to fire off after every so many minutes of drive inactivity. It usually always involves moving the heads back and forth across the entire disk in little steps, and then writing the results to an inside track of the drive reserved for that purpose.

It's not exactly like CHECKDSK, but similar. I think that's what you're hearing and I'm kind of surprised the shop didn't suggest this. It's *very* disconcertingly loud on the three-platter DeskStars if you don't know what it is or you're not use to it, and it sounds (to oldtimers) just like the death-squeals of the older DeskStar line. It's internal to the drive though, and it would do it on an unformatted one the exact same way - nothing (in this case) to do with your O/S or a virus or anything like that.

You can see if there's a way to disable SMART disk monitoring in your BIOS, but bcastner's info suggests that it might not make a difference while the drive is new. I think Maxtor also has a utility to adjust some of the SMART settings and also show a few of the statistics it's collecting. You might be able to 'force' it to perform a scan and at least confirm that that's what you're hearing.]

 

[bcastner]

Dreamland,

The only information I really had about it was questioning the changing results of a new drive over a week with a Maxtor Level 2 Tech. I was using a 3rd-party SMART monitoring tool, and I remember it would report for a period of time even when the system BIOS had SMART disabled. Then it stopped. He said the BIOS was pre-programmed for N number of power-cycles of testing. I remember that the SMART baseline was established and various dates recorded for last entries, but I do not recall the exact number of power cycles. I mis-or-mal-remember 70, but that seems to high to me.

From a quick glance at the Knowledge Base at Maxtor I could find nothing pertinant about SMART, other than it required enabling by the System BIOS. I did find by searching for power cycles that out-of-the-box there will be 10 cycles with the write cache enabled, and then it is disabled. This can be adjusted through a downloadable utility.

 

[Tommy55]

bcastner and Dreamland...

Thanks very much for the informative replies. I have a few points/replies to some of the interesting things you've highlighted...these may or may not be of any merit.

1. I had the drive connected up with the power cable in but the data cable out and it didn't seem to make the noise.

2. As there is very little data on the drive, I put some MP3 files on there, loaded them into Winamp and played them quietly. As the drive was being accessed at the time, this seemed to interrupt the 5 minute click-purr-click cycle - in that it didn't make the noise when it "should" have as the drive was doing something else at the time. This would match up with the fact that it's doing the click/purr thing because the drive is inactive.

3. It was mentioned that the drive would do this whether it was formatted or not and was nothing to do with the operating system. The worrying thing here is that I've had the drive connected to a machine in my work, and it didn't seem to make the noise. However, it could be that there was too much background noise in the room at the time.

4. The drive is mounted vertically. My original hard drive is also mounted in this way. When I had the drive connected with only the power cable only in (when it didn't make any noise), it was horizontal, although this could be incidental.

5. I've run the Maxtor PowerMax drive utility and the hard drive passed all the tests - the only one I didn't run was a low level format. I ran two tests: one lasted a couple of minutes, the other almost an hour. Both of these came back saying the drive was okay.

So to sum up - my main worry is that it doesn't *seem* to do it on another machine, although, as I said - it may just have been that there was too much other noise in the room.

Thanks again for your help and insight - I REALLY appreciate it.

Tommy

 

[Tommy55]

UPDATE:

The hard drive is still making the noise every 5 minutes, even though it's now had at least 10 power ons. I don't think it's anything too serious, as all the disk tests come back okay, however it *is* annoying.

I'm considering a rebuild and then trying to figure out if it's an application causing the issue. If the drive is being accessed (eg. for playing mp3 files) then it doesn't do it. I need to try to figure out what would be accessing an inactive disk...