I had the same problem with my 120 GB Seagate 7200 drive. From what I understand by reading through the forums it happens when the drive goes idle, it does a maintenance routine. Other seagate drives (IV and V) don't do this because the acoustic management software is active. I guess the new drives don't have it installed. The sound goes away when you access something from the drive. My problem was worse with my old case which didn't have any rubber grommets for the hard drives so I bought an acousticase 6670, which is very similar to your case. I couldn't hear the sounds anymore maybe because of the acoustic padding that was supplied with my case. You could also try a smart drive enclosure.

I've got one of these drives too. They all have the same problem and there is no way to stop the drive making the noise once it becomes idle. All you can do is mask this noise by some other means.

The suggestions by Keyoh are good. As the noise is from a maintenance routine whereby it scans the drive you could also try suspending the drive. Suspension is very poor at removing idle whine, but it very good at minimising seek noises. The best method is a combination of an enclosure that is suspended. Just make sure that you watch the temperature of the drive. Once it becomes "decoupled" from the case, it loses its main cooling method of conducting heat into the case.

There is loads of info on how to do all this in this forum. Have a read and then post any questions you may have. If you want to know what I did with my drive I decided that I would always keep it busy. I use it as the home for my temporary internet files, and also for my file-sharing activiites. This stops the maintenance scans from occuring as the drive is no longer idle.

Gotcha. Afaik there can be only 2 reasons for this.

1) The drive itself it making this noise. For you to tell if it is, you must remove it from the case. Listening to it while in the case is no good. If its the drive itself I would suggest an RMA.
2) The vibrations of the HDD are causing resonance in the case. Drive suspension is the way to go here (or resting it on sorbothane strips). Failing that try and identify what part of the case is resonating. You can then try tape, blue tack, or sticking weights to the appropriate panels.

It does, actually. I've suspended my 7200.7 in rubber bands (you coud make something fancier than that of course; I'm just too lazy to buy some elastic cord) and it works great. It's not inaudible but it doesn't transmit any vibration at all to the case. Here's a pic.

Drive temps are at 30C right now, with a front fan installed. Ive never seen it reach over 35C with a front fan, and not much more without it. Case temps are 26C - 30C.

It's SATA, but the 80GB version.

No I didn't, I was merely suggesting a way to suspend your drive.

1. In what frequency is that humming sound re-appearing, the wavelength of the pattern?
2. Does the machine have more disks than this one?

It might be the disks vibrations are being fortified by the vibrations of another disk or fan, just slightly out of sync.

Dang, Spyder beat me to it.

Your noise has all the hallmarks of reinforcement resonance, caused by having multiple drives in the same machine that have slightly different vibration frequencies.

If you don't have multiple drives....I have no idea, other than to tell you to try running the smscan.exe utility, just to be be sure that it's not the offline scan doing it.

Otherwise...suspend and sandwich, and spin the drive down when idle.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

We have ourselves a winner! It's Reinforcement Resonance by a nose!

Ok, it's at least probably reinforcement resonance. Unplug the two that aren't your boot, and I'll give you 20:1 odds that the noise is gone.

Check out Aphono's multiple drive suspension article for idea on how to decouple the drives both from the case and each other.

The trick is that you have to decouple them both from the case, and from each other. So they'll all need their own foam/sorbothane pad to sit on, stacking them on one pad won't be as effective.

In your BQE you may have to remove the HDD rack to have room for an Aphono's style suspension. Or, you could suspend them in the optical drive bays, if you've got 3 empty.

Did you try to one-drive test, just be sure that it eliminated the problem?

You sound like you're on an SPCR infomercial!

"Hooked on Suspension worked for me!"

I'm glad it did the trick. (If you went through all that work and it didn't, I was gonna feel like a schmuck)

Suspension is the simplest, most effective way of reducing HDD noise. It's reduction in noise is often better than buying a new drive. And it's much cheaper! (how much that eleastic set you back, $1? )

Next thing you know you'll be suspending all your noise sources; your fans, your PSU, your cat......

As a followup to your victory over resonance you should post a couple of pics. May be useful to others to see that you can suspend 3 HDD's in a BQE.


(Edited to hide my inability to spell the word "schmuck" )

Yes please!

Cheers,

Jan