New Hard Drive Making Louder Noises

[drsimm]

I just recently with the help from people in this forum was able to upgrade the hard drives in my R10 and R80 Tivo's, Thank you all very much who responded to this newbie. I have noticed especially in the R10 that the normal seek sounds of a hard drive are much louder. I used Maxtor Ultra16 300 GB in each. Is there some way to make these quieter? Both the units have very rigid mounts with no dampening, but I think these type seek (read and write) noises are more than just vibrations. They are the mechanical type of clicking.

Any sugestions, you all have been able to help so far. I will await your wise replies.

[Narf54321]

In my own limited experience, pretty much all the really large-capacity hard drives (over 250GB or so) are notably loud. Anandtech occasionally covers new drive releases, complete with speed and decibel graphs and all that. What I've noticed is that even the 'quietest' drives in the bunch are still louder than the lower-capacity drives.

I've heard that Samsung drives tend to run more quietly, but there was a thread arguing about Samung reliability.

There's a couple of things you can try. One is to put rubber washers/grommets the the drive attaches to the bracket (although you mention head seek as being the possible cause.). You can pull the drive and try enabling acoustic management (HDD Feature Tool) (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm) software on the drive's controller (Seagates don't respond to Acoustic Mgmt, I'm not sure about Maxtors.).

[tivo4mevo]

Turning on ACM can have a pronounced effect. Typically, drive manufacturers ship their high-end drives set to performance (and not quiet). Your 16MB cache drive might fit into that category.

I bought a 160GB Hitachi, and after adjusting the ACM from 254 to ~129, it reduced the seeking chatter considerably.

[drsimm]

Over the weekend I removed the drives and ran the setacm .exe from DOS to the quiet mode and I was absolutley amazed at the difference. I no longer have to unplug the unit at night to sleep it made the unit super quite. All I hear now is the fan but I am used to that low level white noise.

Thank you to all who posted replies and to those of you who have posted in the past it is great to have a place to research problems like this.