Seagate's 1TB/platter chirping drives

Crusader

Crusader

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With the new PC I went for a 3TB Seagate (ST3000DM001) with the 1TB/platter. It was the one component that I did not do extensive research on. After installing it, it runs fine with one small problem - it has this annoying "chirping" sound at random times.

Like this:
[video=youtube;4bQWk6bfbfs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bQWk6bfbfs[/video]

It startles me each and every time it happens. Did some searching and seems that lots of other people are experiencing the same. Apparently it's due to APM parking of the heads.

Do any of you have the same problem with these drives?
 
It's not a problem, the heads are being parked on the ramp to save power. When they are flying over the platters they create drag. This requires more power. So, when not used for a short period of time they park on the ramp, this being the 'chirp' you are hearing. It's perfectly normal. If you monitor the drives logs you'll see it moves into a low power state very often.
 
South_Bit said:
It's not a problem, the heads are being parked on the ramp to save power. When they are flying over the platters they create drag. This requires more power. So, when not used for a short period of time they park on the ramp, this being the 'chirp' you are hearing. It's perfectly normal. If you monitor the drives logs you'll see it moves into a low power state very often.
Click to expand...

I've gathered that it is normal, but it is still very irritating. The strange thing is that it even happens when the drive is in use i.e. playing games etc. Wouldn't the constant parking also decrease the disk lifetime?
 
Sorry, what I meant was it's not a problem with the drive, it's normal. I agree that it can be annoying. Whilst playing a game your machine won't necessarily be writing/reading from the drive constantly.

Western Digital had an issue a while back with their green drives, they would park the heads after only a few seconds of inactivity. Viewing the SMART logs would show a huge amount of head unloading for no apparent reason which caused unnecessary wear. They released a firmware update to resolve the issue.
 
I'm not even sure if the firmware would work for my drive. I emailed Seagate support and got this reply:

"I am not showing that your specific drive is affected by a firmware problem. You may check this yourself at the following weblink using the serial number checking utility. Not all drives in a family were affected:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en&Hilite=207931
The latest generation of our high-capacity hard drives has been programmed to perform regular offline scans to test the drive?s reliability and detect any possible malfunctions that may have been caused during transit.

The offline scanning takes place when the drive is idle. This feature cannot be disabled and does not affect the performance of the hard drive.

Offline scanning helps to maintain the reliability of the drive by moving the heads within the "high-flight zone" in a pre-programmed pattern. The "high-flight zone" is located toward the outside of the platters where the most air flows under the heads during times of inactivity.

If you feel that your noise is excessive , you can run Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic software to check the physical integrity of the drive."
Click to expand...
 
Offline scanning can be disabled with the tools that we have, we often turn it off as a step in the data recovery process. I don't think there are any user accessible tools that can do it though.

I've heard many stories from people and seen many replies from Seagate 'support', many times providing customers with poor or incorrect information. I've never dealt with them myself, but I wouldn't consider the info they provide as 100% accurate.

As a sidenote, offline scanning is a feature in the newer Seagate F3 architecture. There are many, many Seagate models that utilise offline scanning, none of which have this 'chirping' noise, so that alone proves that the Seagate support guy is talking nonsense. Offline scanning is not the cause of the noise.

I think you should try the update and see if it solves your problem.
 
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