Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

[Pentium4]

I have a Seagate 500GB drive (7,770 running hours) and a 1TB Samsung drive (9,500 running hours) and every few seconds one of them will make a chirping sound. It literally sounds like a cricket is in my computer I'm very certain it's one of the drives. Has anyone experienced this before? Is one of them on their way out, like one of the bearings?

[Psycho0124]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

Well, noises coming from a HDD aren't always a sign of impending doom.
Definately worrying though.

1. Could be the drives platters momentarily spinning down and then spinning back up. I had one do that for a bit until I discovered a loose pin in the molex on the 12v line connected to it. It wasn't regular but it sounded kinda "chirpy".

2. Could be the drives control board going nuts and bonking the reader head arm into the end-stop/casing. Once a drive is doing this, they're not usually accessible at all though.

3. I've heard of some drives being noisy with certain APM (Advanced Power Management) features. Frequent noisy read head parking apparently. You could try QuietHDD and tweak the APM values, or use HDParm to disable APM on the drives entirely and see if it helps.

It might be worthwhile to keep a copy of your irreplaceable stuff on both drives or (better yet) on a cloud storage somewhere, just in case.

[dood]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

Determine which one it is and get the data off it.

[Pentium4]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

So, the warmer my room gets the less frequent the sound comes up. Maybe they were too cold? They were both sitting around 21C, and once they got up to 25C it went away completely

[larrymoencurly]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

You might want to ask at HDDguru.com, where there are lots of people who do data recovery.

[Wester547]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

So, the warmer my room gets the less frequent the sound comes up. Maybe they were too cold? They were both sitting around 21C, and once they got up to 25C it went away completely

I'm guessing that they were too cold for too long (because they don't lubricate properly or something like?). Google's study shows that under heavy load, hard drives that run too cold (or that don't run in excess of 27C) are likely to die sooner than hard drives that run warm. Of course, that study was done on servers that run 24/7, so YMMV. And while I imagine you weren't loading the hard drives heavily if they were sitting idle, they still may be writing or reading data depending on what's going on in the background (Hard Disk Sentinel is a good program that tells you the activity of your hard disk in statistics every second).

[Pentium4]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

I'm guessing that they were too cold for too long. Google's study shows that under heavy load, hard drives that run too cold (or that don't run in excess of 27C) are likely to die sooner than hard drives that run warm. Of course, that study was done on servers that run 24/7, so YMMV. And while I imagine you weren't loading the hard drives heavily if they were sitting idle, they still may be writing or reading data depending on what's going on in the background (Hard Disk Sentinel is a good program that tells you the activity of your hard disk in statistics every second).

Cool, thanks for the info!!!

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

Usually a chirping/squeaking noise means that the bearings are shot and the drive is on its way out. Wouldn't surprise me if the factory does drop tests on them these days, just to make sure they fail, and since the heads are parked they don't get bad sectors!

[larrymoencurly]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

I'm guessing that they were too cold for too long (because they don't lubricate properly or something like?).

I forgot that Seagate has issued firmware upgrades that address chirping sounds. I see one for drives with 1TB platters but not for 500GB drives.

It's possible Seagate doesn't list all new firmware because I once got an update for my 7200.12 from HP, about cold temperature operation.

[Shocker]

Re: Is one of my hard drives dying? chirping sound

I read that the results of the Google study were influenced by ball bearings being more common in 5400RPM drives (at the time) than (hotter) 7200RPM. (Apparently) the last generations of BB drives have a short life and there's nothing you can do to extend it.