Strange new HDD behaviour :(

D

dinkd

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well i have been doing lots of head scratching and hair pulling. Bought a new 1.5tb drive for my pc a month ago. and the dam thing intermittently seems to power down and power back up, you literally hear it klunk off and on. I've checked the power settings in the bios and in windows 7 and nothing is set to power down the hdd. and i have others in the machine that don't have this problem. The strange thing is, is when you leave it with just the bios open for a while, you hear the same thing.. so its not a windows issue.

When i watch movies stored on it from across the network, my xbmc stops to buffer whenever the drive does its little "reboot".

I've run all the seagate drive diagnostics, everything is fine.

so the only thing i can think is either the drive is faulty, or my power supply (550w) is not strong enough.. but then why would it always be the same drive that powers down?

anyone with idea? :confused: :confused: :confused:
 
*sigh* thats what i am thinking... will give the store a call today and find out about swapping it..
 
Could well be power... :)

Mind sharing system specs. Full specs please.
 
Have heard this same sound before on one of the older drives, it eventually gave up a few weeks later after it developed bad sectors. I think your drive is also on it's way out. Sorry :(
 
I'd have to agree that it's a faulty drive. If your running a 550w power supply that should be sufficient unless your running a brutal gaming machine with 3 or more HDD's.

It's a small possibility that it's a faulty power cable, try swapping the HDD's power cable with a spare one, or one from another drive like your CD-Rom.
 
sounds allot like power to me, one reason why the same drive keeps going out is because it requires more power than the others, and the constant reboots will eventually
cause bad sectors and other errors and kill the drive.

I'd try the drive at a buddies place that has a stronger power supply for a bit and see if it continues if it does then take it back to be replaced.
 
I'm not so certain that it is definitely a faulty drive. I've got the exact same drive (Seagate 1.5 TB). It does the same thing. I think it's a power saving feature on the drive that it turns itself off when not active. If it switches off while you're watching something then maybe there is a problem. But my drive does the weird klunk as well, only when not in use though. It takes about 5 sec to reboot.
 
The hard drive shouldn't stop in the middle of movies and things though, only when left alone for a long time. And klunk sounds are never good in HDD's, in my experience.
 
Synaesthesia said:
The hard drive shouldn't stop in the middle of movies and things though, only when left alone for a long time. And klunk sounds are never good in HDD's, in my experience.
Click to expand...

The drive made the klunk sound from the time that I've had it. I've had it for about 8 months. Initially I also thought that there was an issue but it does it very consistently, which leads me to believe that it must be a design feature. Many drive manufacturers are touting energy saving drives, maybe this is just a feature. I agree that if it's doing it while in use then there is probably an issue as mine has never done this.
 
the problem is.. the drive is active when it turns off thats why the movie keeps on buffering.

perhaps tonight i will unplug all the other drives and case fans to reduce the load on the power supply and see if it is still doing it. failing that will try it in my machine here at work.
 
when it does turn itself off.. the machine isnt under load. i was watching the performance graphs last night... its only the drive in question active. also, if it was power, surely i would have seen some system instabilities? i don't have freezes or other drives playing up?
 
I checked now, Seagate has a power saving firmware called Power choice. Turns off drives when not in use. However, I just remembered that Windows has a feature that turns drives off when not active. Perhaps while you're watching movies on XBMC, Windows goes into power saving mode as you're not actually using the PC. Could be the problem...
 
nope, i have checked the windows power settings, its set to high performance. and the drives set to spin down never :(

the pc specs (as far as i can remember offhand)

Asus P5Q mobo
intel core 2 quad 2.4 q6600
2 x Kingston 2gb 800mhz
500gb seagate sata
2 x 1tb seagate sata
1 x 1.5tb seagate sata
ati radeon 4850
DVDRW Drive internal SATA
550w thermaltake psu
and a few case fans..
 
I had the exact same problem with my 1.5TB Samsung, that clunk sound scared the living bejesus out of me. I changed some setting wrt HD power management and the issue went away.

Control Panel-> All Control Panel Items-> Power Options-> Change plan settings (for your specific/selected plan)-> Change advanced power settings-> Hard disk-> Turn off hard disk after Setting (Minutes): Never
 
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where do you find the power management settings you are referring to? i can't see anything in the bios that is drive specific and windows is set to never sleep the drives..?
 
When you open Control Panel look at the top right for "View by:", it defaults to "Category" but change it to "Small icons".

Power Options should now be 6th from the bottom on the far right.

The way Win7 shuts the drives down & wake them up is seriously bad for them I reckon.

Hope this helps you and others. Let us know how it goes.
 
ah i have checked that already.. the problem is visible even when you sit in the bios screen so not windows specific :(
 
dinkd said:
ah i have checked that already.. the problem is visible even when you sit in the bios screen so not windows specific :(
Click to expand...

In that case it's HD firmware or BIOS related. There must be a way to turn it off. Dunno how you would go about it in windows but on linux you can use something like "hdparm" to change HD parameters. Maybe have a look into S.M.A.R.T. utilities or send seagate tech support and email.

Post the full make & model of your drive here please and I will see what I can come up with.
 
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i have a similar problem with my seagate 500g hdd. use it as slave and every now and then it just disappears from explorer until reboot. when all the issues with these drives was going on, i checked to see if mine was one of those affected and it was not. i also use it as my default download drive and occasionaly my download aborts , because it can't find the drive. running win7 ult 32bit.
 
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