7200.9, occasional beep or screech?

NathanE · 29 Apr 2007 at 12:03

I have two 500GB variants of these drives in RAID 1.

At first I thought it was maybe the PC speaker (and after convincing myself that I wasn't going mad!), as it sounds like that sort of sound. But then my mate bought two of the exact same drives and also put them into a RAID 1 and has the same wierd sound every now and then.

It's like a very subtle and short duration screech/beep. It's so subtle you could almost mistake it for a creak in your chair or something completely non-computer related!

Anyone else get this?

fobose · 29 Apr 2007 at 12:29

As said above, I would like to know what is causing this too, its not to much bother but would still like to know what it is

<edit>

Just heard the beep/screech noise just then whilst downloading a game on steam. It is a very faint noise, if I had some music playing I would deffinatly not be able to hear it.

IAmATeaf · 29 Apr 2007 at 22:30

I've been here, seen the show and got the t-shirt but I described it as a chirping sound and also thought that it was my mobo that was faulty. Whilst sending my mobo back I installed the drive into another machine which is when I found out it was the drive. The drive was a 7200.7 160Gb and just like you I had bought 2 and the second 1 was as quiet as a church mouse.

It drove me mad as the sound seems to be totally random, even occured for me whilst sitting in the BIOS. The supplier I got the drive from said it was fine as did Seagate as Seatools showed no errors so I decided that I couldn't trust my data on it so relegated it to being the OS drive. I ended up RMAing the drive some 9 months later as the drive was showing problems and the replacement drive was fine.

Clarkey · 30 Apr 2007 at 11:46

my last seagate did that, was worrying but nothing ever went wrong with it.

NathanE · 30 Apr 2007 at 12:02

Must be by design then. Strange :confused:

IAmATeaf · 2 May 2007 at 10:06

NathanE said:
Must be by design then. Strange

According to Seagate the chirps were when the drive was deciding recalibrate itself when it was idle but as I said I had 2 drives, exactly the same models and purchased at the same time and the other drive never made any such noises.

basmic · 2 May 2007 at 10:20

You'll notice it does it when the ambient temperature changes from hot/cold to cold/hot. Basically it's the heads recallibrating, because heat causes a slight expansion in metal.

I've had my Hitachi drives do this for two summers now, and now they're starting to do it every so often once again.

IAmATeaf · 2 May 2007 at 18:30

For me the chirping sound was pretty random but you'd get at least 3 chirps every 5 minutes or so, sometimes it would chirp like made for 5 odd seconds.

I personally didn't care initially but eventually I started to hate the sound.

I remember describing the sound to Seagate as the sound a PC speaker would make if you connected a battery across the speaker terminals and it was that loud.