Noisy External Hard Drive

[shawsinio]

Hi all,

I have just purchased a 160GB external HD off eBay , have set it all up etc, and have found it to be really quite noisy, even when im not writing anything to it or reading from it, its just mounted on the desktop...

Is this normal? is there any way i can run a diagnostic on it to see if hes 'healthy'?

Thanks for all your replies,

Shawsinio

 

[dogsbody]

What sort of noise? Is it fan noise, or is it a rattling / squealing / scraping noise?

If it's heavy fan noise, try googling for the hard drive make and model, i.e. "Lacie Big Disk Extreme 320Gb review" or searching for the drive on Dabs.com or Amazon and reading the customer reviews there.

If it's one of the other noises, and it's loud enough to notice, I would suggest that it may not be entirely 100% tip-top.

 

[shawsinio]

yeh its more the scraping squaling kind...

and its not really a make, it looks just like the pikaone drives, but has 'disk' written on the side...bought it becasue it seemed good value at the time...

are there any programs that will be able to run a diagnostic on the drive?

 

[dogsbody]

Might be worth using Disk Utility to run a check of the drive itself, as for mechanical faults, I don't think a program would pick that kind of thing up.

"Seemed like a bargain" - classic!

I don't know how much you paid, but Dabs are doing Western Digital "My Book " external HDs for really good prices (USB2.0) and about £30 more for FW400/USB2.0 ones. I just bought one for a client and they are rather pleasant - black, book shaped and a nice blue light on the front, with an internal blue ring that shows the HD usage. Neat.

 

[shawsinio]

Might be worth using Disk Utility to run a check of the drive itself, as for mechanical faults, I don't think a program would pick that kind of thing up.

"Seemed like a bargain" - classic!

I don't know how much you paid, but Dabs are doing Western Digital "My Book " external HDs for really good prices (USB2.0) and about £30 more for FW400/USB2.0 ones. I just bought one for a client and they are rather pleasant - black, book shaped and a nice blue light on the front, with an internal blue ring that shows the HD usage. Neat.

ok thanks, they look rather cool, will probably get one of these methinks!

well, we all know the moral of the story here...be wary of bargains!

thanks again!

 

[lonelemur90]

sounds like it was used a lot by the previous owner. the "clicking" sound you hear is the actuator arm moving across the surface of the disk. another idea for future reference is to just get a hard drive enclosure for notebook hard drives so you can simply put in a new one when the old one goes bad.

 

[dogsbody]

Note of caution with the "My Book" HDs

ok thanks, they look rather cool, will probably get one of these methinks!

well, we all know the moral of the story here...be wary of bargains!

thanks again!

Once you have one, I reckon you'll want to install a bookshelf above your desk and buy more...I don't even own one yet and I was speculating on it this morning!

 

[jtown]

If it's a continuous, whining sound, it's the spindle motor or bearings. I had a drive that ran like that for years until I replaced it. Very annoying but I was poor. I have another one now that I put in an external case when it started getting like that. It still works but it's annoying so I only use it when I need to move a lot of data from one place to another.

I wouldn't trust it for anything important, tho, and neither should you. Now you know why it was for sale.

A diagnosis problem isn't going to report any problems because there is no problem with the data handling side of the drive. It'll give a clean bill of health right up to the time the platters stop spinning.