Brand new Seagate ST500DM0 = constant, low-volume rattle

[littlebigman]

Hello

As the 200GB Seagate IDE drive holding backups of my data was showing signs of giving up the ghost, I turned off my desktop computer, connected a brand new 500GB Seagate ST500DM0 in parallel (488GB Seagate ST500DM0 02-1BD142), booted off a USB keydrive, ran Clonezilla, unplugged the old drive, and booted back in XP successfully.

However, I notice the new drive generates a constant, low-volume rattle. I don't know how to record this, but it sounds like seek noise although nothing is happening on that drive.

FWIW, the old Seagate had a similar issue, where it would generate louder rattling noise for a few seconds every 30s or so: Google seemed to say it was a feature called Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM), and the work-around I found is to write a little program that wrote to the drive every 10s to keep AMA in check.

However, this trick doesn't do anything for the new drive.

AAM is supposed to have been removed by Seagate* but Speccy says that the new drive supports "S.M.A.R.T., AAM, NCQ".

Next, I tried running Seagate's SeaTools 1.2.0.6 for Windows, but it doesn't find the drive :-/

Has someone experienced the same issue? Is there a way to silence the drive through software? As the drive works fine otherwise and that constant rattle is a feature from Seagate, there's no way I can get my money back, so I'm stuck with that drive.

Thank you.

* "AAM is no longer available for Seagate and Western Digital drives. In 2008, Seagate issued a statement announcing it was removing AAM capabilities from all its drives because Convolve alleged that one of its patents, US Patent No. 6,314,473, covers AAM technology. Western Digital began doing the same in 2011, without making any official announcements, nor updating their product documentation."