My 160 gig Barracuda SATA drive has this REALLY irritating habit of seeming to go through a continuous defragging or drive indexing process. This despite the fact that I am not defragging and drive indexing is turned off.

The sound is not chunking of a drive accessing various different areas of the platters, more like the buzzing of a drive scanning through and entire folder of pictures or something. Except that it does it for minutes at a time for no apparent reason.

The drive is not the system drive, but an additional data drive, so it shouldn't be windows doing house keeping.

Opening the drive in explorer will halt the drive activity for about a minute, then it starts again until you explore a different folder or access a file on the drive, which again interupts the noise.

Did I say that it's REALLY annoying. Going to have to ditch the drives if I can't stop them doing this!!

Check this thread for more info:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=23671

I have the same problem with 7200.7 80G and 200G IDE drives.

Try NoizEnvader's suggestion.

Its not a bug, its a feature ( ) of the 7200.7 and 7200.8's.

After a few minutes of idling, the drive will start a self diagnostic routine... hence the seek noise.

This is creepy. As I opened this topic, I was wondering why I was hearing a buzzing from my 7200.7 sitting in my closet.

Well thanks for your input guys, now I know what the noise is. Haven't found a way to stop it though - DTemp (nice little app) can switch the scanning on or off on my PATA 'cuda system drive but not the SATA data drive.

I am currently working on some audio sound effects (it's my job) and to have this bloody noise appear at regular intervals is really bad. So I ripped out the SATA data connector and power connector with the PC still switched on.

Yes, SATA is hot-pluggable!
The drive dissapeared from 'My Computer' as though I had unplugged a USB drive.

I wonder if SMART was switched off would that cure the problem? Unfortunately my BIOS does not seem to have this as an option; I know lots do.

Perhaps SPCR could modify their 'recommended' list to at least warn of this problem?

Very possible. However, it's most likely not neccesary to turn off smart entirely, only the 'automatic offline test'. Smartmontools (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/) can do this. I'm guessing there are other SMART tools that can too.

Here's a paragraph from smartmontools documentation:


As far as I've noticed, all drives I've owned had this feature disabled by default. Interesting that Seagate has apparently decided to enable it by default.

yes this is the diagnostic firmware thingy.

yes it creates a horribly loud buzzing sound for 30 seconds upon idle.

no it doesnt have a silent mode, and it is very annoying.



The good part? This noise seems to dissapear after about a month or two of use. My drive doesn't even do it anymore (but maybe it could just be a fluke. i read when i originally complained about this that another user noticed the sound went away with time as well)


i suggest you suspend your drive on foam or with elastic!!!

I have a very early PATA 200GB 7200.7, that does NOT make this noise.

I bought it the moment it was available in the UK. And yes I do have SMART enabled.

Andy

I had a Seagate 160 pata that use to do that too. It was sooo annoying. I have since sold the hdd to a friend.

ROFL, I hope you sold it real cheap, or else that was just plain mean.

ARGH!

This is so fvcking annoying. I can't believe Seagate added this feature with NO WAY TO DISABLE IT!!!!

DTemp does not work to disable Autoscan.

This is THE LAST Seagate drive I buy for my personal computers.

-Ed