7200.7 really noisy

[Atlantean]

My seagate drive is really noisy. I have a seagate 7200.7 drive and it has been making a lot of noise, so much that I am going to be switching to another drive for my main drive. Every time that I load a program or open something it makes a lot of noise, it reminds me of the noise that my parents old computer used to make, their computer thats 6 or 7 years old now (no longer in use). Is this a common problem with the seagate drives or did I just get a crappy one?

 

[JimRaynor]

Those drives are supposed to be quiet, maybe it's not in there securely enough and is rattling around? I know you pretty much said it's seek noises that are bothering you.. but I dunno.

 

[Nohr]

The Seagate Barracuda IV line of drives are known for being very quiet running drives. I've got a 40GB 7200RPM in one of my systems and I don't notice it being there at all. Either it's probably going to die soon (back up!) or it's not mounted well enough as mentioned by Jim above.

 

[lansens]

Try finding some rubber grommets to mount the drive with. It will make a world of difference. If you still feel like the drive is dieing, you should back up your data and run Seagate's hard drive tests.

 

[Serp86]

it may not be secured in place. Tighten the srews. You can add damping as mantioned above, but these drives are supposed to be nearly inaudible without these. so something must be wrong. Heck, my WD is almost inaudible TO ME, and they are rated as some of the loudiest.

Or it may be failing if it started making the noise recently. If it was always like this, then you could have recieved a bad drive (if i is tightly secured).

 

[Justorq]

or you could use that acoustic management tool from IBM to lower the noise. I have a Barracuda IV and it used to make a lot of noise until I used that tool ... Try it.

Justin

 

[lansens]

What does that tool do? Slow the drive down or something?

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: lansens
What does that tool do? Slow the drive down or something?

Basically. You'll get another 0.5ms of access time, but the drive will shut right up.

If you're really hardcore, you can suspension-mount it.

- M4H

 

[lansens]

"Feature Tool (v1.92)
The Feature Tool allows you to control some of the features of our Deskstar and Travelstar high performance ATA hard disk drives and supports 48-bit addressing, so it will work with the new large capacity drives. This version adds support for our latest drives. The Feature Tool allows you to:
Enable or disable the read-ahead or write cache.
Change the drive Automatic Acoustic Management settings to the:
Lowest acoustic emanation setting (Quiet Seek Mode), or
Maximum performance level (Normal Seek Mode)."

Thats from the Hitachi site. Looks to me like it will slow the drive down and you will take a performance hit using that tool.

 

[DarkKnight]

do you have that SATA version of the drive? I've heard those are noisy.

 

[Yourself]

Originally posted by: DarkKnight
do you have that SATA version of the drive? I've heard those are noisy.

I had one of the SATA versions....noisy as hell


Self

 

[GRIFFIN1]

I just installed a 200 gig 7200.7 standard IDE, and it's MUCH quiter than the two western digital 120 gig SE drives it replaced. I have no experience with SATA drives, but I don't see why they would be louder than the regualar drives.

 

[Night Blade]

I have the 160GB SATA Seagate, it's not all that bad, the previous drive in there was a Maxtor 120GB SATA & it was alot worse.

My server runs a Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB IDE, my god that thing is dead silent, should of picked up another one for this machine instead of the Seagate :|.

 

[Atlantean]

Originally posted by: DarkKnight
do you have that SATA version of the drive? I've heard those are noisy.

Yes I do have the SATA version of the drive... I forgot to put that in my original post. It is mounted properly, and is firmly secured. Is it just a noisy product and they falsely advertised it on their site? I have two other drives in my machine that are completely silent.