Yes, i know maxtors are loud pieces of crap hard drives, but I'm running into a problem that I'd like your guys' input on.

At idle, my hard drive intermittently hums and vibrates. It follows a set pattern of ~3 seconds silent, followed by ~2 seconds of hum. I can feel the vibration of the drive when i touch it with my fingers. I RMA'ed a new hard drive from Maxtor, and the new one does the same thing. Would the hard drive mounting style of the Antec 3700BQE solve this problem? Or
am i screwed? This is super annoying, espeically when i'm trying to sleep.
Oh yah, acoustic managment does nothing to help with the hum.


On the other hand, i'm toally happy with my seagate..

thx for your time.

Hmm - is there actually anything wrong with the drive (I.e.: does SMART show up anything on the way out?).

Do be aware that RMA's are very rarely new items, usually they tend to be refurbished, so don't be surprised if they might misbehave from time to time...!

What you're experiencing is what I call a harmonic interface cycle effect (my not-technically exact technical term for it). Basically, the frequency that the drive's vibrations translate into your causes a warbling effect, not unlike the warbling effect many people experience when using two fans; the whine from multiple hard drives often develops a warbling effect just like this (or on rare occasions, a single drive).

Soft-mounting the drive will not completely eliminate it (if it's only caused by a single drive in and of itself), but it will help quite a bit. More often than not, the harmonic cycle effect comes from two sources intermingling, so if both your hard drives are hard mounted to the same structure, this will occur, particularly if both drives are 7200rpm. In this case, the effect may completely disappear once one of the drives is softmounted to isolate it from the other drive.

I recommend softmounting one of the drives to see if you can eliminate it entirely. If not, then there's a harmonic interface cycle effect in the drive itself, probably due to interfacing between two chassis components, or even with the bearing itself. I'm not sure which model you have, but I own three Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 series 60GB drives (used to be four, actually, 'til one went to the big hard drive grave yard in the sky) and they do not exhibit this effect in my current case, but they did in my old case, where they were hard mounted within detachable cages. Two drives is worse than three, and three is worse than four, in terms of the harmonic cycle effect, because when there's more drives, they can't synch up so perfectly to produce the perfect warble effect like two drives with just slightly off-synch vibration frequencies would.

This effect is the main reason why I stopped using my pair of WD400BBs in RAID 0 a while back; although the fans of the system drowned out much of the whine itself, it was the warbling effect of the two drives combined that drove me nuts. When, before that, I had four of them in RAID 0, it wasn't as bad, as 'til I dropped it down to two.

-Ed

thank you so much for the help guys.. SMART shows nothing, and the fact that both drives i've tried show the exact same problem makes me thing that Edward may be right.

I DO have 2 7200 rpm drives, with the other being a seagate. And they ARE both mounted to the same structure. The hum i hear is very low pitch. I have a Antec 3700BQE case on the way and im hoping that the seperate drive trays, along with the soft mounting, will help to alleviate the effect.

Okay, I'm sorry, but I have to do it...

I CHOOSE YOU, MANKEY!

Uhh......am I missing something here?

Pokemon?......

!HAI! Pokemon-desu...

-Eduado-san