Vibrating hard drive

sirlemonhead · 18 Jul 2006 at 20:07

Got an new WD drive.

Heard a horrible clunk noise from it one night, and then the mouse cursor on my pc would move slowly across the screen (the whole pc seemed to be intermittently pausing)

I disconnected the drive for a few days and tried it again, and it seemed perfect.

But i'm noticing that it seems to be vibrating very very fast. If I put my hand to the side of it, it's very noticable (compared to my other two WD drives which dont feel like theyre vibrating at all.

It's like the drive is constantly spinning at high speed.

Any ideas what might be up?

Steve_h · 18 Jul 2006 at 20:44

Not sounding good,if it vibrating as bad as you say then an e-mail to WD requesting an RMA sounds like your best bet.Maybe that the bearings are failing if it's vibrating badly,is it noisey?

sirlemonhead · 18 Jul 2006 at 21:27

Seems quiet. It was hard to tell with the fans in my case...I disconnected it as Systool said it's temp dropped to 1 degrees suddenly.

It was a replacement drive from a Maxtor RMA. No data on it at all it's that new. Gah :mad:

sirlemonhead · 24 Jul 2006 at 20:15

Hmm the WD diagnostics program says the drive is ok according to the SMART data..

If I run a disk scan using the WD tools, my old 120 gig WD will spin up, and this is exactly what the problem drive is doing ALL the time. It's like it's constantly being accessed and never spins down.

Do hard drives spin at the same speed all the time or not? My two older drives are dead still, but if I put my hand to the problem drive, I can feel the movement from the disk inside.

I'm probably over-exaggerating the problem but i'm incredibly paranoid about loosing data as i've had two drives die on me previously :mad:

Steve_h · 25 Jul 2006 at 21:59

What is it like in terms of spinning up since you heard the clunk noise?
Is it still transfering data etc... ok?
not really up on WD's as I have only used Seagates although I have a WD in my daughters pc and it's louder than mine.
Have you tried WD support line?

Cyber-Mav · 26 Jul 2006 at 01:27

could be a failing drive. smart is not always correct.

sirlemonhead · 26 Jul 2006 at 19:28

Steve_h said:
What is it like in terms of spinning up since you heard the clunk noise?
Is it still transfering data etc... ok?
not really up on WD's as I have only used Seagates although I have a WD in my daughters pc and it's louder than mine.
Have you tried WD support line?

Seems to be running fine.

Transferring data ok as far as I can tell, installed Far Cry on it, played a few levels, all seemed well.

HD Tach says it has a burst speed of 112 MB/sec and the graph shows a steady declining line (so no erratic weirdness)

Temps seem identical to my other WD drive (though sys tool says theyre both currently at 1 degree, which is sorta good as before only the 'dodgy' drive would do this)

The drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
whereas the other 'good' drive is the same model but a 320GB version.

The 320 gig drive, with my hand to the side of it, apart from the slight heat from it, doesn't even feel like it's even connected as i'm just browsing in windows so it's sitting fairly idle. The 250 gig drive is noticably active, despite it not even being an OS drive or having any programs running from it.

Maybe it's meant to do that? :confused: