Seagate Momentus 7200.2 and funny noises?

I have a new Dell XPS M1530 that I've ordered with a 7200rpm drive. Turns out it's a Seagate.

Thrown Windows off it, put initially Solaris on it, but ran into the well-known power management problem you get with non-Windows systems. Lack of hdparm or any alternative for it, I put Linux on it. During boot, the advanced power management gets turned off (apm=254).

Thing now is, instead of head parking when idling, after a short while of inactivity, the drive starts making noises like it's seeking uniformly a whole lot for a while, when there's absolutely no activity indicated by any Linux tool that's useful to diagnose disks. SMART attributes don't show anything special, except that the drive's at 45-47°C (I'm already planning to get a cooling pad).

Someone suggested that it may be thermal calibration, but from what I know from desktop drives, that's usual some clicking.

What could it be? Is this normal, does anyone else notice the same? Is this heat calibration? Is it SMART selftesting? Is the drive bad?

Thanks for any help.

 

is it a clicking noise?

 

Check it using Seagate's Seatools. It seems that there's a Linux version (at the bottom of the page).

John

 

It's no clicking noise. I've fixed that issue. As I said, it sounds like the drive heads are seeking a lot.

And I've tried Seatools. It just allows me to set some drive parameters regarding how the drive logic should act. The drive tests pass, too.

 

Wow, that seems interesting. After having run the Seatools self-test, it stopped doing the seeking noises. I suppose it was some sort of self-test shtick.

 

Too much hope. The seeking noises are back and running the Seatools self-test doesn't make it go away.

 

If the diagnostics say the HDD is OK then the problem probably rests with Linux and the HDD power management. Have you tried any different options? It might be better to not park the head. I recall some months back I had an interesting problem with Vista + Turbo Memory when, on battery power, the HDD was powering down and then immediately starting again. I suspect that two parts of the system were arguing about what the HDD should do.

Your other option is to get a quieter HDD such as Samsung or Fujitsu.

John

 

The selftest thing was just a fluke.

The power management is turned off. Heads don't park at all. I expect the drive to work fine now. It doesn't do the idle seeking when APM is on.

Meanwhile I kept digging around and found about various things Seagate drives might do and features that are standard but not mentioned. One of them is something called STIR, or Seek to Increase Reliability (which I think has been renamed or is called otherwise at Seagate meanwhile), which makes the heads seek when the drive idles, to prevent the head resting over a single track and heating it up.

Now whether this is the case or not, I don't know, since it isn't mentioned anywhere (or carries another name), because I suppose this might be a standard feature. I've asked Seagate tech support and got a canned reply instead, which doesn't help at all. Not to mention that it suggests powering the drive on without SATA cable, which naturally doesn't allow me to disable APM and have the drive park heads before said seeking noises kick in.

I don't know how to contact a Seagate person who actually knows what he's dealing with.