ST380023A - Clicking Noise?

[SilverLock]

I Know that drives occasionally make small clicking noises when they are being accessed, but the new SATA drive I installed seems to be making this noise louder than my other Seagate drives - can anyone comment on wether this is normal or not.

Thanks.

 

[SilverLock]

bump

 

[Jiggz]

Some drives make more noise than others. The question is when is the noise made. If it's during file access that is almost normal. But if it's erratic and just makes noise unpredictably, then it's not normal. It could be a loose power connector or the drive is faulty. Test the drive using hdd utilities and at the same time test for the noise by accessing files and see if it only makes noise during access. Otherwise, I'll start backing up the HDD.

 

[MDE]

Seagate partially disabled the acoustic management features on the SATA drives to give them a speed boost.

 

[RalfHutter]

The drive you have is a Barracuda V and it has it's AAM off by default so it's seeks will be louder than the Barracuda IVs. You can set the AAM on that drive using the "Hitachi Feature Tool". It runs off a floppy. Download it from here.

 

[Auric]

I may be wrong, but I recall that the 7200.7 SATA version of the V could not have AAM enabled. So, give it a try but don't be surprised if it does not work.

 

[RalfHutter]

The 7200.7 is an entirely different series of drive than the Barracuda V, and yes it's AAM has been disabled due to a lawsuit against Seagate by Convolve.

The Barracuda V can have it's AAM turned on by using the software in the link that I provided.

 

[Auric]

Oh, right, that slipped my mind. One of the reasons I chose Maxtor last time was lack of AAM on the fast 80GB 8MB 'cuda, because although the PATA versions still had it, the SATA did not and that was the only way they chose to produce the 80GB for some reason.