Hard Drive spin-up: two stages?

Hopefully someone can answer this for me. My Seagate 7200.11 1TB hard drive seems to have two 'stages' when I press the power button.

Right when I press the button, it has a *loud* motor sound for just over a second, then I can hear it spin up fully in the 3-4 seconds after that, with a much quieter sound. More of a *whisper* motor sound.

I question if this is normal because the 7200.10 320GB drive I had did not do this. This drive has been working fine for about a year, but I don't know if it's normal. I would hate to find out afterwards that it was a warning of failure.

 

I've only experienced it with drives suffering from noisy motors, and that was years back. They got progressively worse... but things may be different now?

 

That's basically it, really. Internal drives in the past used a grounding pad placed on the motor spindle to reduce electrical noise. I'm talking about the noise that can screw up data.

When the motor spun up at lower rpm's it would cause the motor grounding pad to move and vibrate. It went away at higher rpm's. It was an issue for Winchester Drives back in the mid to late 80's.

I don't know if drive mfg's have change that design. The good news is it probably won't hurt the drive or at least I haven't encountered a drive failing from that.

 

I experienced this on my 500gb 7200 seagate before i switched it to the optical bay as a storage drive. Now as windows does not boot from it it doesnt make this noise. I think its normal

 

This will sound a silly question but are all 4 screws holding the HDD in place tight ?

 

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, the screws are tight. I need to do the firmware upgrade, but apparently you can't do it with an external drive.

I guess I can just hope its fine!

 

Personally, I'd be wary. Unless it's a known "characteristic" of these drives... the ones I referred to earlier were my experiences from thousands of machines - they weren't subject to thorough testing, but certainly didn't feel right, nor was it consistent with the drives that did feel right.

It may be a feature of more modern designs - possibly it was decided that a two-stage spin-up was a good thing for motor longevity. I really don't know, but I'd not trust it with anything important unless it was a known "feature"...