Sound from Seagate 2TB drive normal?

[Robert P]

Got a 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive from CompUSA. It makes what at least to me sounds like a "bad" sound. This abrupt *Greeyatch* sound whenever it's first accessed. Obviously something to do with the heads accessing data. It otherwise seems to work okay.

I took it back, got another, it does the same thing. Apparently this is normal for this drive? None of my other drives Maxtor, WD, or Seagate do this.

Any insights?

Thanks

 

[wolfeking]

that seems to be the scratch of death. I would take it back and ask for a western digital or Samsung drive to replace it. The HDD should not make a noise other than the head spinning which should be near silent.

 

[Robert P]

Found this thread about a similar issue with a Seagate 3TB drive.

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barrac...aking-Weird-quot-chirp-quot-Sound/td-p/156353

Someone even posted a recording of the sound, seems like essentially the same one I'm hearing.

http://soundcloud.com/user3445428/weird-chirp-sound-seagate

Possibly some head park power saving thing. Maybe solvable with a firmware update. Will report back.

 

[S.T.A.R.S.]

Most Seagate 3 TB drives do that.It's normal don't worry about that.

However if you get constant errors on the HDD for no reason such as a folder that is not there and a minute ago it was and you need to keep doing CHKDSK very very very often to fix the problem which you did not cause then yes,the HDD is bad.Otherwise it's not.

By the way you should have hear the sound of those very very old 4 GB to 20 GB drives.Maaaaan...they were REALLY loud when reading/writing anything!
I even own few of them and they all work great!

 

[Robert P]

Based on limited observation, it seems like the firmware update has alleviated the issue so far.