Help, wierd hard drive noise ...

[Krazi]

... I have a Seagate Baracuda IV 40GB which is only 4 months old. Yesterday I started hearing a beep-click but didn't know where it was coming from. Today, when I was capturing video from my DV camcorder, I would lose frames everytime I heard the beep-click. I've run defrag and the seagate utilities and everything comes up clean but the noise is still there and it affects the perfomance of the drive. Anyone have theis problem, or know what it is? Is there a fix for it, or should I be looking at doing a full backup and sending the drive in for warranty repair?

 

[ISAslot]

I think that could be the head retracting after it had troubing finding some info where it thought it should be...

Regardless, I think you should atleast prepare for the worst.

 

[HeinekinMan]

I had this exact same drive for about a week when mine did the EXACT same thing as yours (the beep sound) but my system would freeze (Win2k) and lockup requiring a hard reboot. Even then, my system would not boot up sometimes until the system had been turned off for an extended period of time. Mine was made in Thailand, Dec 2001. Needless to say I got rid of the POS!

I downloaded and ran the SeaTools diags even the extended diags which did not find any problem with the drive. I believe that mine was heat related however the drive did not seem to get very hot, warm to the touch but nothing excessive. My case temps are around 21-23 degrees C at idle. There's no way I could tolerate a drive exhibiting this kind of random behavior...

What's funny is that this Seagate replaced an IBM 75GXP that I had running perfectly for almost 2.5 years before it starting making the screetch of death sound!! It's been RMA'd so I'm wondering if I'll be getting a 120GXP... Damn and it was the first Seagate that I had purchased in quite a while; for three days it seemed to be a very fine drive, fast and oh so quiet!!! The quietest drive I've ever owned. I ended up going back to IBM and going with an 80 GB 120GXP...

 

[Krazi]

My system temps are pretty good too. Case temp around 23 C. Lots of airflow. I'm backing up everything as we speak. The problem seems to disappear for a short time after a hard reboot (leaving powered down for 2-3 minutes) which leads me to believe maybe it is heat related. So, I guess the consensus is, it will probably have to go in on warranty repair? Too bad it didn't happen when I first got it, I would have RMA'd and gone for the IBM deskstar

 

[HeinekinMan]

Yeah I was very fortunate that my Seagate started to act up in the first few days well before the 30 day period for exchange or full refund from the vendor; I bought mine for 99.95 at a local Fry's Electronics, an excellent deal on a good drive (also had a 25.00 rebate!). I'm sure that its still a great drive (excellent reviews and comments from other users) and that it was just bad luck for me to have bought this particular unit!! The thing that I didn't like was that it was not factory sealed. It was a bare OEM drive but was in an anti-static blister pack (I've heard this blister pack described as a SeaShell). Could of easily been a customer return...

 

[Dreadogg]

I am starting to see alot of people having problems with the Segate drives! Or maybe just alot of people been buying these lately since IBM has been getting all the bad press!