Hitachi hard drive weird noise

[shovenose]

It's a 82.3GB 7200RPM 3.2" IDE drive originally from an iMac G4... later put into a Dell Dimension 4600, now I got it back after several years...

Made some bad noises earlier today but now it's fine again... maybe with heat it works better better not ever turn off the computer it's in

Anyway, it's made this strange noise for years. It did it in the iMac way back when... usually when it's idle. It does it sort of randomly. Sometimes twice pretty soon together, sometimes it's more than an hour in between...

It's not a clicking noise.
It's a pulsating whining/groaning noise...
What could it be?
The drive is from 2003 but it's been doing it for at least the last years.

[c_hegge]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

IIRC I also had that with an 80GB Hitachi Deathstar. It did it for a while, but eventually died not long after retiring the PC.

[kc8adu]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

whats smart look like?
i keep speedfan on all my boxes .
had a wd in a system at the shop that would get a whine like a mosquito flying by your ear.
took this as a sign of impending death and had the user clone and replace.but cant find anything wrong in smart other than one reallocated sector.

[shovenose]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

I haven't checked smart. I'll that later. The noise is like long, though, it's weird. And it pulsates, but in the same pulsation pattern every time?

[joshnz]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

whats smart look like?

Here is smart data from a western digital drive only issue i see is spin up time i guess that is from it's live as a external drive.

[Scenic]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

That noise is normal.

My 80GB Excelstor Ganymede J680 (Hitachi/IBM OEM) does the same thing. And has done so since i got it 6 or so years ago. No SMART problems whatsoever, no bad sectors. My bro's 2nd PC has a 160GB Excelstor from a different series, and it does the exact same thing, just sounds slightly different.

It's odd, but apparently normal. Self test in idle?!

I've recorded a few of those test cycles with the HDD connected to my USB adapter, sitting in idle all the time.

Microphone was right on top of the drive.
They seem to do 2 variations of that noise (long and short test?!)

I've filtered out anything below 200Hz (motor hum + 50Hz buzz)

had to make a RAR out of it as i can't upload MP3s >.>

edit: f*ck it.. i'll do it the old way
http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/badcaps...tor-noises.mp3

[Scenic]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

As for SMART, HD Tune actually tells you what a value means (most of the time).

like so

...

[shovenose]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

That noise is normal.

My 80GB Excelstor Ganymede J680 (Hitachi/IBM OEM) does the same thing. And has done so since i got it 6 or so years ago. No SMART problems whatsoever, no bad sectors. My bro's 2nd PC has a 160GB Excelstor from a different series, and it does the exact same thing, just sounds slightly different.

It's odd, but apparently normal. Self test in idle?!

I've recorded a few of those test cycles with the HDD connected to my USB adapter, sitting in idle all the time.

Microphone was right on top of the drive.
They seem to do 2 variations of that noise (long and short test?!)

I've filtered out anything below 200Hz (motor hum + 50Hz buzz)

had to make a RAR out of it as i can't upload MP3s >.>

edit: f*ck it.. i'll do it the old way
http://bambooz.pytalhost.net/badcaps...tor-noises.mp3

YES YES YES!
That is (almost) exactly the noise mine makes... so I shouldn't be worried? Awesome!

[Scenic]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

Mine has been doing that since i got it. I've been using it for mp3 storage/backup in an external casing. Zero probs..

note the edit in #7 btw.. *cough*

I have absolutely no idea what the hell it is, but as it only does it in idle, the only thing that makes sense would be some kind of self-test.

[kc8adu]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

would be helpful to see the raw data.

Here is smart data from a western digital drive only issue i see is spin up time i guess that is from it's live as a external drive.

[joshnz]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

would be helpful to see the raw data.

there you go

[Scenic]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

holy sh*t.. this is why i hate normal WD Green drives.
Load cycle count is at 37744
i.e.: the HDD parked its heads 37,744 times (probably more by now) :O

And the total power on time is just ~324 days.
My main rig HDDs are way over 500 days power on time and the load cycle (head parking) counter has yet to reach 1000

That drive prolly won't live more than a year from now

[Sparky]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

My brother had a Hitachi that did that. It was a drive he got as a warranty replacement when his deathstar died. Made him uneasy after that previous drive had died, so he got rid of it.

[mariushm]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

You guys are not reading the values correctly.

Just because the data field has 37744 doesn't mean the drive parked heads that many times. More often the values are proprietary to each manufacturer, you have to drop the last byte or divide by 100... it's nothing standard.

Here's the four drives in my system... the 400 GB one is the oldest, about 3 years (second picture). The newest is the 2 TB green one (last picture) - 69 power cycles in about 3-5 months sounds about right - usually restarting my system once every 2 weeks or more.

The only thing reliable is the "Power Cycle Count" and "Temperature" and maybe "Reallocation event count" - the rest pretty much have different meaning or need to be processed first...

See for example the Seagate (the third picture), you really think the drive had 112 billion head flying hours or 243 million raw read errors? The drive's perfectly fine.

As for the sound... it doesn't sound like thermal recalibration... could be just some weird resonance from the motor... maybe a bug in the design that otherwise doesn't affect the performance or reliability?

[Scenic]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

You guys are not reading the values correctly.

Just because the data field has 37744 doesn't mean the drive parked heads that many times. More often the values are proprietary to each manufacturer, you have to drop the last byte or divide by 100... it's nothing standard.

For WD drives, load cycle count is definitely the counter for the head parking. Other drives might use it for something different.
You can easily verify this by noting down the value, and the next time you power cycle the computer compare the values. With an external case it would be even easier to do that.

Ideally, "load cycle count" it should be somewhere near the "power cycle count" value, which it is for your WD1002FAEX (Caviar Black) as well as your WD4000AAKS (Caviar Blue) and the Seagate.

Now take look at your WD20EARS (Caviar Green) and look at "load cycle count"..

Caviar Black: 176 power cycles, 130 load cycles
Caviar Blue: 846 power cycles, 886 load cycles
Seagate: 76 power cycles, 77 load cycles
aaaand:
Caviar Green: 69 power cycles, 20866 load cycles

notice something?

Those damn regular Caviar Green drives have a ~4sec idle timeout, after which they automatically park their heads (HDD firmware side.. not OS) on a plastic ramp.
None of the other WD series (Black, Blue, AV-Green, (Veloci)Raptor) have this timer.

It's basically supposed to save power, but all it does is kill the HDDs faster.
I've seen quite a lot of 1TB WD Greens dead after 8-12 months

As for the sound... it doesn't sound like thermal recalibration... could be just some weird resonance from the motor... maybe a bug in the design that otherwise doesn't affect the performance or reliability?

It has definitely something to do with the heads, because when you read something while it does these strange noises it immediately stops the noise and starts reading.
And it just did that again while i was typing this lol

Some more WD's with their power and load cycle counts close to each other
Note: If the 2nd letter after the size is a "V", it's an AV series HDD.

My WD10EVDS is identical to the WD10EADS, with the exception of the retarded head parking timer.
The UDMA CRC Error counter is because of the crappy JMicron IDE controller on my motherboard (which doesn't have native chipset IDE ports anymore)

[c_hegge]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

YES YES YES!
That is (almost) exactly the noise mine makes... so I shouldn't be worried? Awesome!

Exactly the same noise I had too.

[gg1978]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

Is this a Hitach 7k250 by any chance?? I have an original 2003 vintage one that's PATA and 120G.. meow's every 10 minutes when it's turned on, and is normal for these drives..

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

It's signaling the Mother Ship.

[c_hegge]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

[seanc]

Re: Hitachi hard drive weird noise

Here's the one in my MacBook Pro.

smartctl 5.41 2011-04-06 r3314 [i386-apple-darwin9.8.0] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:   Western Digital Scorpio Blue Serial ATA family
Device Model:   WDC WD5000BEVT-22ZAT0
Serial Number:  
LU WWN Device Id: 
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity:  500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Device is:    In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:  8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:  Fri Dec 9 21:34:52 2011 GMT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00)	Offline data collection activity
					was never started.
					Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:   (  0)	The previous self-test routine completed
					without error or no self-test has ever 
					been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection: 		(13200) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: 			 (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
					Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
					Suspend Offline collection upon new
					command.
					Offline surface scan supported.
					Self-test supported.
					Conveyance Self-test supported.
					Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:      (0x0003)	Saves SMART data before entering
					power-saving mode.
					Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:    (0x01)	Error logging supported.
					General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time: 	 (  2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: 	 ( 154) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: 	 (  5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: 	    (0x303f)	SCT Status supported.
					SCT Error Recovery Control supported.
					SCT Feature Control supported.
					SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME     FLAG   VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE   UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate   0x002f  200  200  051  Pre-fail Always    -    6
 3 Spin_Up_Time      0x0027  186  179  021  Pre-fail Always    -    1691
 4 Start_Stop_Count    0x0032  098  098  000  Old_age  Always    -    2629
 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0033  200  200  140  Pre-fail Always    -    0
 7 Seek_Error_Rate     0x002e  100  253  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
 9 Power_On_Hours     0x0032  096  096  000  Old_age  Always    -    3240
 10 Spin_Retry_Count    0x0033  100  100  051  Pre-fail Always    -    0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count    0x0032  098  098  000  Old_age  Always    -    2546
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032  197  197  000  Old_age  Always    -    2445
193 Load_Cycle_Count    0x0032  075  075  000  Old_age  Always    -    375567
194 Temperature_Celsius   0x0022  108  096  000  Old_age  Always    -    39
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032  200  200  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032  200  200  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable  0x0030  100  253  000  Old_age  Offline   -    0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count  0x0032  200  200  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate  0x0009  100  253  051  Pre-fail Offline   -    0