How to get an RMA on my noisy Maxtor drive?

[Naruto]

Its supposed to be liquid and not ball bearing but its loud like a mother! Ok not that loud, but it makes high pitch and whine sounds. Its an 80gb 2mb cache version, D740-LX. Whenever the ide activity light goes on, there is a whine sound from the hdd. This is pretty annoying when compared to the utter silence of my seagate barracuda IV. I heard I can RMA it, but how. I don't think I can walk into staples and just say "Hey, I want to get a new one of these cause Maxtor allows RMAs" and expect it to work. Also I sent in the rebate a long time ago so I don't have the UPC barcode anymore. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

 

[EeyoreX]

Follow the steps at Maxtor's site.

\Dan

 

[Naruto]

Do I have to wait for them to send me a new one or will I get a replacement automatically?

 

[acidwizard]

I had a similar problem with my Maxtor drive a while ago. I think it's also a D740-LX, but not the FDB kind. Anyway, I noticed that if I took the drive out of the case, it didn't make any noise while running. So I cushioned the drive cage with some electrical tape and kept the screws a bit looser. Seemed to cut down the whining quite a bit.

 

[Naruto]

Thanks AcidWizard for the tip. I just took out my drive and set it on some books and voila, its hella quiet! I can only hear it when I put my hear an inch above it. Ran a file benchmark and could hardly hear it. How did you set up your drive cage so it was quiet? Was it any louder after putting it in the modded drive cage than leaving it completely out? Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[acidwizard]

Well, I didn't do the greatest job with the tape, so the noise wasn't eliminated completely, but it was greatly reduced. It wasn't as quiet as just leaving it set out on a book. At that point, though, the fans in my case became the most annoying source of noise.
Anyway, I have an Antec case with removable drive cages. I just took one out, and wrapped a layer or two of electrical tape around the section where the HD was going to go. This helped a bit, but I noticed that the noise was much less if I didn't tighten the screws completely also. Hope this helps.

 

[Naruto]

Hmmm I just read an article on rubber grommet mounting, this might be even more quieter than electric tape. Thanks for the help acidwizard. I got another whiny hard drive and could also make that one quiet too.