Should a new Hard Drive make noise?

[snakebite]

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[ QUOTE ]
BentHeadTX said:
I am rather rough on my drives,
Killed WD, Maxtor, Quantum and Samsung die on me. Have had an IBM drive run for 3.5 years now but the other IBM Deathstar (Deskstar) died spectacularly though. Those drives sucked so bad IBM sold out that division to Hitachi.
At this point, I have a 80GB WD with 8mb cache...been working fine for the last 11 months. I have a 15GB drive laying around, I will transfer important files to it and then unplug it as backup. Waiting for the inevitable disk failure.
Anyone want a dead Asus mobo? What about a dead MSI mobo with leaking capacitors? Good thing flashlights are more reliable than crappy computer parts!

[/ QUOTE ]

 

[Charles Bradshaw]

I have never had a new hdd fail. I have had one used hdd fail, and it was a Maxtor 30 GB. Of the 3 used 30 GB, I think a second one is starting to go. I put those in a system I built for a friend, and just recently swapped those out for a pair of much newer WD 60 GB ata100 OEM hdds. I used the Partition Commander boot diskette to handle the partitioning, including copying partitions to minimize data loss. Another friend managed to rescue the important files for him.

Overall, I prefer Maxtor or Western Digital.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

I've had the best overall experience with WD, as long as I stay away from that damned EZ-Bios program that used to come with the drives, back when older BIOSs couldn't see the whole drive. In general I like WD and that's all I've been buying lately.

I've had one Maxtor fail catastrophically after fairly light use, and I've had some bad experiences with Seagate.
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

Anyone been following the debate about superparamagnetism and large drives?

 

[Zelandeth]

Well, Maxtor and I have had a VERY bad history. Basically, because I don't seem to need to do more than look at one to make it start doing scary things. Last one I had never actually died, but used to make noises like a TARDIS dematerialising at seemingly random intervals. Not actually sure where that one is just now.

WD, had a couple of drives have patchy bad sectors appearing, never died totally though.

Seagate, never had any problems, other than that I've always found them unacceptably noisy.

Connor (Do they even still exist?), never had any trouble with them, other than a couple of dodgy sectors, that's only after some pretty severe physical abuse though.

Quantum: Same as Connor, other than one controller board failure, which I repaired myself (Resistor fell off...literally!)

IBM I have a good history with however. Got an old SCSI based DORS-32160 (2.1Gb I think), which dates back to 1996...has been making very odd noises on startup (ticking for ages, before eventually having the motor start) every day for the last 5 years...when will that thing admit defeat and DIE!?!

60Gb IBM DeskStar that's in this machine just now is the quietest drive I've yet enocountered, and basically classifies as silent. (And that's in a quiet PC too).

Most robust drives I think that I've seen are probably split 50/50 Between the Quantum ProDrive LPS series, and the Connor CFS Series. Okay, there are all archeic, but that's what I work with most of the time. These have been in various old laptops I've used, and even with pretty heavy abuse, I've never had one die, had a couple of head bounces and bad sectors appearing, but never actually had a drive die on me altogether.

Another one, would be the Micropolis 1598MD in my old PC (Which isn't actually in use just now...I only have so much space!), that's a 1.2Gb drive, full height, 5.25" SCSI drive, circa 1991...still running, no bad sectors. Damn quiet when idle too...we won't talk about when it's being accessed though...sure that thing used to set of sesmeographs when I was writing stuff to it...

If anyone has a bunch of (or any) old (<1Gb) harddrives that are in need of a new home, feel free to PM/Email me. I spend quite a lot of time restoring older computers, hence have homes for drives such as these. IDE, SCSI, ST506, anything that you'd probably stuff in scrapheap. It could help me get an old machine back into working order.

 

[tiktok 22]

Hi Guys,

Just a tip. If your HD crashes, it might be possible to get the information off of it. Remover the HD from the computer and put it in a sealed ziplock bag. Put it in the freezer for about three hours. Remove the drive and re-install it in the computer. It should work long enough to get back some of the data depending on what is wrong with the drive.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

[ QUOTE ]
tiktok 22 said:
Hi Guys,

Just a tip. If your HD crashes, it might be possible to get the information off of it. Remover the HD from the computer and put it in a sealed ziplock bag. Put it in the freezer for about three hours. Remove the drive and re-install it in the computer. It should work long enough to get back some of the data depending on what is wrong with the drive.

[/ QUOTE ]
Huh... I've heard this before, but I've never tried it. What is the mechanism behind the temporary revival? Is there a recommended waiting period after removing the HD from the freezer to avoid condensation, or do you just stick the frozen drive in the computer right away?

I used to use a similar trick to revive old camera pickup tubes, only with refrigeration instead of freezing. Only worked on Saticons though.

 

[Eugene]

Yep, the freezer thing works. My boss a few years ago had sold a laptop to a friend and then brought it to me for warranty repair as the hdd was failing. He didn't have a backup of the data and I found I could copy a bit off the drive until it started to warm up and then it would fail. I ended up setting the drive outside in the winter to cool it off then would copy the data off until it was warm again then repeat to get more data. Years before that I needed to recover the big 5.25" full height scsi drive from the call logging system in a 911 dispatch center. That drive wouldn't spin up. I ended up opening the drive and flicking it with my finger to get it started spinning and then ran a backup for their data.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

[ QUOTE ]
Eugene said:
(snip)...I ended up opening the drive and flicking it with my finger to get it started spinning and then ran a backup for their data.

[/ QUOTE ]

Think I'm gonna have to resort to this for one of the bad drives.

 

[snakebite]

i remember doing the freezer trick with the old kalok/xebec drives.they had lots of trouble with those dieing when hot.
i got the weirdest look when i put a long cable on the drive and put it in the shop fridge to keep it cold while recovering data.