Hitachi, Samsung and The Click Of Death

thegoonden · 13 May 2008 at 22:02

What's going on with Hitaci and Samsung drives.
All my internals are Hitachi and I have 6 Freecom Externals fitted with Samsung drives.

They are forever making that sound, the sound which to someone of my generation (the generation who have never learned to love windows because they used computers before it, and know how wrong it is

), means one of your drives has just gone to the great RAID array in the sky.

I assume it's just a drive reset and that the safety spring that pulls the head off the drive before it spins down (they still do the thing where the head floats on the air dragged round by the spinning platter don't they?), is WAY over zealous.

I further assume that modern drives need to reset a little more often owing to higher surface precision (think how much longer a DVD player spends auto calibrating than a CD does).

But I WISH THEY'D STOP IT, I still jump when I hear it.

Do other modern drives make scary noises.

BTW: note to anyone thinking of buying Hitachi drives. They are SO quite and lovely, but if you put a pile of them in a sytem, you'll wait forever for it to get through drive detection. For some reason, and mechanism beyond my ken, they start up sequentially! the 2nd drive wont even spin until the first one is spun up and registered with the IDE/SATA controller.

Might just be coincidence, that the bios's in both my boards do this.

paradigm · 13 May 2008 at 23:10

thegoonden said:
BTW: note to anyone thinking of buying Hitachi drives. They are SO quite and lovely, but if you put a pile of them in a sytem, you'll wait forever for it to get through drive detection. For some reason, and mechanism beyond my ken, they start up sequentially! the 2nd drive wont even spin until the first one is spun up and registered with the IDE/SATA controller.

Might just be coincidence, that the bios's in both my boards do this.

I guess it must just be coincidence. I've got 6 hitachis in my machine at the moment, and they detect instantly, although they are connected through the IP35 PRO's RAID chipset, configured as a RAID5 array.

thegoonden · 14 May 2008 at 00:57

Must be the BIOS then, SATA detection made easier I suppose, or to minimize the shock to the PSU of half a dozen drives trying to drag their platters up to speed.

Still, really good drives, and I say that despite managing to kill one quite effectively a couple of weeks ago.
(it now plays a tune instead of spinning, no, really, it does).

PS, do yours click periodically?
(though it's the samsungs in the externals that are by far the worse offenders, the Hitachi's do, now and then, have a wee click, with no ill effects)

Mint_Sauce · 14 May 2008 at 09:28

I jump every time I turn my machine off so I feel your pain. With 5 drives shutting down at the same time, it's like Johnny 5 clicking his fingers. I don't like it.

ElectroBlaster · 14 May 2008 at 11:20

I have a pc here with 4 hitachi drives and god dam are they slow to get going. The bios picks them up in turn and then they click and spin up, its really irritating. My seagates dont do this

thegoonden · 14 May 2008 at 13:43

Ahh, so the drives ARE an issue.
Certain BIOS's only mayhaps.

It's very noble and commendable that they do it obviously, but when you have 3 internals and 4 externals which ALSO wish to make their debut on the system in solo, all I can say is, it's a good bloomin job it's a Linux box, and doesn't really do reboots.

Don't mind so much the rife fusilade on shutdown, it when one of them (as I say, much more often it's the samsung externals) needs to "stretch it's muscles" a bit.......read read read read read CLICK_I'M_DEAD read read read read, without missing a beat (or a byte).

Cruel and unusual user punishment.