Seagate drives making chirping noise

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gareth41

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#116965 15-May-2013 09:43

Ive got several seagate drives, desktop drives 3TB 3.5" and server sas drives 500GB 2.5" 10k and they all seem to make intermittent "chirping" noises. The same noise you hear when the drive spins up and the heads sync. Every so often I hear the noise, probably about every 5 min. Is this normal? One desktop drive i've had for almost a year makes the noise but doesn't seem to affect its performance in any way. The drives have done this from brand new.

Mark

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#820074 15-May-2013 14:04

Might be a thermal calibration thing, or the hamster inside is just getting bad tempered

Ragnor

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#820258 15-May-2013 18:54

Try checking the health of the disks with
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

johnr

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#820259 15-May-2013 18:56

Have you checked for any birds stuck in them?

surfisup1000

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#820273 15-May-2013 19:30

johnr: Have you checked for any birds stuck in them?

I had a mouse run into the expansion port of my computer case .

robjg63

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#820275 15-May-2013 19:36

Check if there are firmware updates on the seagate website.

I had to replace my PC in February - the motherboard konked out - so bought a new box that had a 1TB drive. The old PC had a 1TB HDD the same make and model - So after a while I popped the old HDD (6 months old) into the new PC. I noticed that I could here a chirp occasionally - quite regularly in fact. Had to be the 'older' disk.

Anyway - downloaded the segate tools from the website ran some tests - both disks fine - then I noticed they had different versions of firmware. The newer silent disk was up to date - older one was a version behind.

So I updated using the Seagate tools - really easy to do - took a minute - end result - hasnt chirped since.

Maybe this will work for you.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

gareth41

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#820303 15-May-2013 20:39

johnr: Have you checked for any birds stuck in them?

Yeah found a few pigeons hiding in them, now im watching them roost in the local vodafone tower.

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gareth41

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#820306 15-May-2013 20:39

robjg63: Check if there are firmware updates on the seagate website.

I had to replace my PC in February - the motherboard konked out - so bought a new box that had a 1TB drive. The old PC had a 1TB HDD the same make and model - So after a while I popped the old HDD (6 months old) into the new PC. I noticed that I could here a chirp occasionally - quite regularly in fact. Had to be the 'older' disk.

Anyway - downloaded the segate tools from the website ran some tests - both disks fine - then I noticed they had different versions of firmware. The newer silent disk was up to date - older one was a version behind.

So I updated using the Seagate tools - really easy to do - took a minute - end result - hasnt chirped since.

Maybe this will work for you.

Thanks i'll give this a go

kiwitrc

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#820337 15-May-2013 21:44

I pulled one of these out of my hard drive that was squeaking a lot

grant_k

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#820346 15-May-2013 22:09

About 2 months ago I had a Seagate 3TB drive that was doing this. It turns out to be a warning that the power supply voltage is bit low, and only happened for me during intense disc activity such as when compacting or de-fragmenting. OK I thought, I can live with that, just occasional chirps didn't bother me.

However, I downloaded Acronis Drive Monitor just to be sure nothing else was amiss. Unfortunately it was!

My drive health was reported by Acronis at 5% because the drive had been internally mapping out bad sectors, and had just about run out of extra sectors to reshuffle. I managed to get all the data off and sent it back to the retailer for a replacement as it was only 6 months old. As this is the second Seagate drive I've had problems with in recent years, I bought a WD to replace it with. It works fine in the same case with the same PSU, so go figure as to why the Seagate was complaining about low voltage. I don't think I'll be buying another Seagate.