Seagate HD chirping

[Greubin]

Just finished installing two Seagate 250gb HD's in my HR10-250. As soon as the drives initialized, the primary drive started making a "chirping" sound. Drives booted fine, it's working normally otherwise. The only upgrades to the OS was to install a kernel from the PTV bootdisk and write an rc.sysinit.author file.

Anyone running Seagate drives noticed this sound? I'm definitely going to contact NewEgg.com for an RMA come monday.

[Narf54321]

I've got a couple TiVos (series 2 standalones) with 300GB drives, and they are noticebly loud. I don't know about "chirping", but drive access is certainly audible. In general I like Seagate drives, I find they are usually more reliable than other brands, but I wish they would support the "standard" accoustic adjustment tools.

The 7200.7 (the ".7" series) drives are definitely louder than the 7200.8 series. The 7200.9 series are also supposed to be very quiet, but I haven't seen anything definitive about those drives, yet. I've stayed with a 120GB in the bedroom because of the noise factor.

[RavenStL]

My 160's (3) are all kinda loud, mainly seaking. Now In my HD Tivo, I have a 300 Gig Seagate and the OEM WD 250. My case even has a slight "HUM" to it. Nothing very loud but the drives are noticeably loud when in a silent room. I have no problems except when the fan is off in our bedroom. My wife always has a fan running for "noise" to sleep. Oxy-Moron to me, but hey lets not go there, cause I always lose :)

5 year warrantry, get a new one if it craps out.

[crazyrat]

I just bought 2 Seagate 300G 7200.8 drives and they both chirp occasionally. I notice disk access stop for a second or two when this happens. I hope I'm not looking at bad drives myself...

[Greubin]

I just bought 2 Seagate 300G 7200.8 drives and they both chirp occasionally. I notice disk access stop for a second or two when this happens. I hope I'm not looking at bad drives myself...

I sent both of mine back to Newegg. New ones should arrive Monday, I hope they're ok out of the box. If I were you, I'd return them if possible.

[crazyrat]

I bought both of mine from Circuit City but I threw away the boxes which were cut up to get rebates. I guess I'll wait for it to die and return it to Seacrate.

Thanks

[Spydertech]

Why wait for them to die???

Go ahead and start the RMA now - while you can still copy the data.

Now, I'm not postive about this, but Maxtor requires you to have a failure code (I'm not sure about Seagate, as I haven't had one fail in the last year or so). Thing is, all you had to do was note that NOISE was the reason for the warranty replacement, and the code was no longer needed.

Worst case - call Seagate and get a manual RMA started. Just explain that the noise is not normal - you have other Seagate drives - and they don't make the noise :hint:

I wouldn't wait for an actual failure and loss of data...

Spyder

[crazyrat]

I'm used to dealing with Maxtor. They won't even start the RMA process unless you have some failure code. I've written a few down in case I ever need to return any Maxtors :) .

I'm going to start the Seacrate RMA process tonight and see if I can get a new drive or two out of this.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Spydertech]

I know I got around the failure code a few months back on a pair of Maxtor drives - Hard Drive Clicking VERY loud.

I just left the failure code area blank and it allowed me to continue on.

But - that was a few months ago, things change I guess..

But I wouldn't accept that you have to wait for a DEAD drive before replacement.

Failures come in many forms...

Spydertech

[natboy]

have you tried running the hdparm util on it? It'll quiet it down if nothing else. I know once I did that to my drive it sounds alot better.

[Narf54321]

I'm pretty sure hdparm doesn't work on Seagate drives. Seagate prefers some sort of proprietary hardware "advancements" rather than just slow down their head seek speeds.