Hello helpful forumites!

I just bought a 40Gb 7200.7 from a mail order company. I bought it on the basis that it would be a relatively quite drive, but when it's running it produces a very loud whine while it is idling. I would guess it's pitched at about 14-15Khz (about the same as a TV) and I can hear it from across the room - about 2 meters. At the moment the case completely removed from the PC so I guess it'll cut some of the noise when it is back on, but I'm a little worried about the level of noise.

The other strange thing is that whenever I'm doing something (ie the heads are moving), the noise either reduces or stops completely - I'm left with just the normal fan noise.

I think this is a problem worth sending the drive back to the shop for, but I'm looking for some feedback regarding what level of noise to expect and if this is normal behaviour for this drive.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Hello,

in my experience (limited to just two Barracudas though) this hdd is far from being a quite drive, due to 7200 rpms and the higher frequency whine that comes with it. I suppose the noise will be noticed differently by other people, since it's not just dBa that counts but frequency spectrum, time dependence of the sound emitted and how this is perceived by you.

Something you might want to try is decoupling the drive from the case though. In my case i placed the drive on some cork/foam rubber.
This way the drive is quite noticably more silent than before.

Ok...just took it completly out of the case and I could still hear it across the room. Not resonating through the metal then...

I sat it on the plastic container it came in, on a thick cloth, on wood...I couldn't tell the difference.

I would suggest sending it back ASAP. I have a Barracuda 7200.7 (ATA100/80Gb/2Mb) and although it is just a little bit noisier than the Barracuda IV (ATA100/60Gb/2Mb) it replaced it is in my opinion a really quiet drive. My monitor makes more noise (Hitachi 19" CRT)

I decoupled the drive with NoVibes III + foambed, it helps cutting down the seek noise. But it really shouldn´t be that audible without decoupling. And it definitely shouldn´t make any idle whine whatsoever, that is the reason I started using Barracudas in the first place after almost going insane with IBM and Samsung. I had a 60 Gb Samsung (5200 rpm) that started to make this zirring (metallic ringing) noise after a couple months, really awful.

I have a 7200.7 40Gb in my case. The drive is suspended from rubber bands (so totally decoupled) - in essence it is inaudible and is 1m from my ear. I have power down option selected, so occasionally I am working, Win stops (waiting for the drive to wind up) and if I listen fairly carefully (in a silent house) I can just hear the motor noise. If I put my ear right at the front of my case (like 15cm from the drive, the NMB fan at 5V (inbetween my ear and the drive) is the only thing I can hear.

For me this thing really is quiet/virtually inaudible; sounds like yours is nasty. You may just want to try the Hitachi utility (or Drive Temp) and see if you have access to Acoustic Management: so far nobody with these drives seems to but maybe you have really late microcode. (mine is 1 month old).

Curtis:
My Cuda IV had the same problem when I first bought it. I emailed Seagate and I tried their suggestions, but nothing helped. So I exchanged the drive for a replacement, but it also had the whine. I decided that this might be a universal problem, so I stuck it out to see if the problem would go away. The idle whine stopped after the drive had a chance to break-in, however; a different whine remained when the drive wasn't at idle. This whine wasn't as loud, but just enough to drive me crazy. This lasted for almost a year, until I replaced my old PSU with a Fortron. Now there is no whine. Others have also had whine problems with Seagate drives when used with certain PSUs. BTW, I just bought a 7200.7 40GB, but I haven't had a chance in install it yet.

Ok, thanks for the help guys.

I'll try the Drive Temp thingy later, but I'll probably end up sending it back. The SeaTools diagnosis program seems to think the disk is fine, and for the short time I've been using it it seems to be performing fine. The noise it makes is driving me crazy.

Fortunately there is almost nothing installed on it.

I just installed my 40GB 7200.7 and I can't hear any whine. Sounds like you might want to send it back.

OK, thanks.

The Hitachi tool reported that the drive didn't have any acoustics management features, so back to the shop it goes, I guess...

On account of it being easter, I haven't yet been able to get in contact with the shop, so I've spent my time giving this drive a bit of a run.

What I need now is some information about normal SMART attributes. I downloaded a few monitoring tools (DTemp and Active SMART) to watch the drive as I put it through it's paces (running a full surface scan at the moment).

First up, the raw value for the raw read error rate is steadily increasing (as reported by DTemp) - is this normal for this drive? Also the attribute value for this counter is hovering around 67-66 can anybody tell me what it is supposed to start at?

SMART is also predicting failure of this attribute today, which is odd as it didn't yesterday...

I would greatly appreciate sombody with this drive to run some kind of monitoring tool and let me know what the nominal values for all the attributes are.