Seagate Barracuda has problems in one machine but not another.

R

Robert P

Member
Have a 500 gig Seagate Barracuda SATA drive that was formerly working okay in my XP machine but started developing the repeating "chirpy/crunchy" sound that seems to be unique to Seagates.

Stuck the Seagate drive in my Win7 Home Premium machine and the issue disappears. Put a WD Caviar SATA drive into the XP machine on the same power connector and SATA cable that the Seagate drive was on and it's fine.

What would cause this Seagate drive to suddenly have issues only on the XP machine and not the Win7 machine?
 
Just because a hard drive makes some sort of noise doesn't immediately mean it's dead. That being said, dead drives frequently make noise, but noise isn't instantly the sign of a dead drive. The differences in sound you notice are more likely a result of differences in how the motherboard and/or OS handle the drive. If it's constantly spinning up and changing speeds you're more likely to notice it. If it works fine still and passes hardware checks like Seatools then it's probably fine.
 
Darren said:
Just because a hard drive makes some sort of noise doesn't immediately mean it's dead. That being said, dead drives frequently make noise, but noise isn't instantly the sign of a dead drive. The differences in sound you notice are more likely a result of differences in how the motherboard and/or OS handle the drive. If it's constantly spinning up and changing speeds you're more likely to notice it. If it works fine still and passes hardware checks like Seatools then it's probably fine.
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This was definitely exhibiting a problem. The noise was constant and repetitive like other drives I've seen die. HD tune testing show speed at around 4 megs. Definitely not normal healthy drive behavior and it doesn't do it in the Win7 machine.
 
However, even though it isn't making noise upon running Seatools tests I see it does fail the the long generic test on the Win7 machine.
 
Was there a particular difference in volume of data where you witnessed the noisiness?

I've seen a few drives fail further into the platter where you can have some initial data work 'okay' at the beginning of the platter such as in a fresh install, but corrupt further data added to the drive. Since it failed a long test I'd just replace it though.
 
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spirit said:
Didn't see that.

@Robert P if it failed the long generic test then the drive is defective so it's time to chuck it out.
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Does the failed long generic most likely indicate an electronic or mechanical issue? You feel that no fix I can apply to it - formatting, zeroing the drive etc. is going to make the drive usable? Pisses me off because the drive has been sitting around but has low hours on it.

I'm done with Seagate drives.
 
It could be either. I've seen more failed Seagate drives in the last few years then any other brand drive. It was Western Digital before that.
 
Robert P said:
Does the failed long generic most likely indicate an electronic or mechanical issue? You feel that no fix I can apply to it - formatting, zeroing the drive etc. is going to make the drive usable? Pisses me off because the drive has been sitting around but has low hours on it.

I'm done with Seagate drives.
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Yeah it could be either. The noise might suggest it's a mechanical issue. There's nothing you can do to help it unless there are just bad sectors on the drive that SeaTools can repair by writing over them. Otherwise it's toast.

I've not had much luck with Seagate recently, either. I tend to stick to WD now but hard drives do fail. It's just the nature of the beasts I'm afraid.
 
spirit said:
I tend to stick to WD now but hard drives do fail. It's just the nature of the beasts I'm afraid.
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This.

I've had Seagate Barrucuda going strong in my desktop for over 4 years now. It's got more to do with luck than brand usually.
 
Darren said:
This.

I've had Seagate Barrucuda going strong in my desktop for over 4 years now. It's got more to do with luck than brand usually.
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Yeah and also because at one point I only bought Seagates, so naturally I had more of those fail than WDs. Now that I only buy WD (they tend to be cheaper too) I'm sure in a few years time I'll be seeing a lot of my WD drives die. ;)
 
spirit said:
Yeah and also because at one point I only bought Seagates, so naturally I had more of those fail than WDs. Now that I only buy WD (they tend to be cheaper too) I'm sure in a few years time I'll be seeing a lot of my WD drives die. ;)
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After I got my PC I started converting all of my friends to PC gaming and subsequently built a lot of machines (5+) with similar hardware. Most if not all have Seagate Barracudas and none have died yet over the past few years. Only dead drives I've dealt with are laptop drives.

I do worry though that mine might be prepping to kick the bucket as it makes some interesting noises these days. :D
 
Darren said:
After I got my PC I started converting all of my friends to PC gaming and subsequently built a lot of machines (5+) with similar hardware. Most if not all have Seagate Barracudas and none have died yet over the past few years. Only dead drives I've dealt with are laptop drives.

I do worry though that mine might be prepping to kick the bucket as it makes some interesting noises these days. :D
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The worst one I had was a 2.5" Seagate SSHD. Four months from new and it was dead. Maybe the failure rates on SSHDs are higher or I was just extremely unlucky! :D
 
spirit said:
The worst one I had was a 2.5" Seagate SSHD.
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At least it saved you from extra months of lackluster performance :D

I have one of those in my work laptop and it's pretty unbearable, that being said I've had SSDs at home since about 2010..
 
beers said:
At least it saved you from extra months of lackluster performance :D

I have one of those in my work laptop and it's pretty unbearable, that being said I've had SSDs at home since about 2010..
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I bought it in May 2014 to go in my (brand new, at the time) ThinkPad. I had been using SSDs since 2011 and I was so disappointed with the SSHD performance. With it being 5,400 RPM it actually felt much slower than the 7,200 RPM disk the ThinkPad shipped with. In the end I just bought an 840 EVO 250GB to put in my ThinkPad and that was much more like the SSDs I had been using for years before. :) The only good things about this SSHD were that Windows booted quickly and it was 1TB. But a 7,200 RPM 1TB disk would've been much faster.
 
I need to put an SSD in my laptop as the 5400RPM drive in there bogs at times. Boots pretty quick but if you wake it up from sleep it can take a bit to catch itself up.
 
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