Velociraptor - is this noise / behaviour normal?

dirtydog

dirtydog

dirtydog

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I got a Velociraptor recently (WD3000GLFS) and noise levels are low, I can't hear it at idle and seek noise is muted.

BUT...

Occasionally it makes a burst of noise for maybe 3-4 seconds, which sounds like the drive thrashing - although the HDD activity light on the front of the PC does not light up during this time.

I am almost certain this is NOT anything to do with Windows. It is not swapping, indexing or anything like that. I am using XP Pro, not Vista which I know is infamous for HDD thrashing.

I am convinced it is not OS related because it has also done it while I've been in the BIOS screen as well.

Is the drive faulty or is this normal behaviour? :confused: The latter seems doubtful to me. It passes WD's diagnostic software tests so I presume there would be no chance of an RMA authorisation anyway.
 
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There is a little util on the Frenzy OS disk called Testdisk which is really handy for spotting dying hard drives. The whole cd is only 200mb and free, check it out. I have two 36GB raptors in raid and never get this. I see you have XP so drive indexing isnt really an option I would imagine....unless the new Windows Search update has it built in....
 
I have disabled write behind caching to see if that makes a difference. In fact arguably that should be disabled anyway shouldn't it, for data security?
 
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