Do your WD drives "chirp"?

[augiem]

I've been running my computer without the case on it for a couple of days and I noticed my WD200JB drive making some noises occasionally that kind of bother me.

You know the "popclick" type of noise they make when the BIOS is posting? (platters just spinning up, heads are doing their thing) Well, it seems to be doing a shorter version of that, almost a "chirp" repeatedly in the middle of large file transfers especially, but sometimes for no reason.

I wouldn't be so worried, but tonight I downloaded a 500Meg file w/internet explorer, and when the file DL'd, IE copied it over to another partition on the 200JB. MY SYSTEM DRAGGED TO A CRAWL!! (P4-1.6@2.2, 512MB Rambus, 80gb udma100 slave, etc.)

Anything to worry about or am I just being paranoid. I've had it for like a year, but I still can't get used to that loud popclick on startup/reset... I'm used to Maxtors.

Augie

 

[MoonSword]

I have an old Western Digital 6.4 GB drive that didn't make any unusual noises until the day it died (drive lasted 6 years). On that day, the drive made this horrible ear-piercing screeching sound during POST that just made one's hair stand on end.

If you are not sure about the integrity of your drive, you may want to download WD's diagnostic tool and run some tests on it.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#diagutils

MoonSword

 

[nanaki333]

yeah, one of mine did chirp. it was because it actually shook itself loose from the screws. after i tightened them, the sound went away. guess i didn't get to it fast enough, because it was doing it long enough to physically damage the hdd. now it has bad sectors and freezes my comp.

 

[augiem]

Hmm... I think I'll run that prog...

Mine isn't loose or anything. The sound is definitely internal. But I'm thinking that may be just how WD's sound? I dunno. I guess I should just do a backup... Now where did I put those 50 dvd's... Ugh.

 

[nanaki333]

hmm.. i just remember going in there and feeling it and it was loose. maybe it was already loose and it caused damage to start that chirping. i had mine in the 5.25 bay on the them brackets so you can fit an HDD up there.

 

[augiem]

Originally posted by: nanaki333
hmm.. i just remember going in there and feeling it and it was loose. maybe it was already loose and it caused damage to start that chirping. i had mine in the 5.25 bay on the them brackets so you can fit an HDD up there.

Hmmm, I also am using a 5.25 bay.... but it feels tight as can be.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: augiem
I've been running my computer without the case on it for a couple of days and I noticed my WD200JB drive making some noises occasionally that kind of bother me.

You know the "popclick" type of noise they make when the BIOS is posting? (platters just spinning up, heads are doing their thing) Well, it seems to be doing a shorter version of that, almost a "chirp" repeatedly in the middle of large file transfers especially, but sometimes for no reason.

I wouldn't be so worried, but tonight I downloaded a 500Meg file w/internet explorer, and when the file DL'd, IE copied it over to another partition on the 200JB. MY SYSTEM DRAGGED TO A CRAWL!! (P4-1.6@2.2, 512MB Rambus, 80gb udma100 slave, etc.)

Anything to worry about or am I just being paranoid. I've had it for like a year, but I still can't get used to that loud popclick on startup/reset... I'm used to Maxtors.

Augie

If the system is slowing down/pausing randomly, that's a pretty clear sign that something is wrong. I would definately download and run the diagnostics program from WD. I would also consider checking the drive's mounting, and also the IDE and power cable connections. It's remotely possible that a poor connection with either of these is causing the drive to reset itself during operations, and thus it also defaults to a slower transfer speed and/or the unexpected reset causes Windows' to slow down the transfer speed because it detects timeouts or errors.

If, after checking the mounting and all of the cables, it still makes unusual noises, then it most likely is the drive. I recommend backing it up immediately. (I find that Ghost 2003 works well for me, YMMV. If your drive has physical bad sectors, then I recommend using the '-fro' switch, which causes it to continue the operation and skip bad sectors, instead of retrying forever. You will lose that particular file in the backup, however.)