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    Thrashing and horrible noise on new Seagate Momentus...why?!

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by iblokh, Jan 21, 2008.

  1. iblokh

    iblokh Notebook Enthusiast

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    Specs:
    Dell Inspiron 5100
    2.66 Ghz P4
    1.5Gb Ram
    XP sp2

    My old 40gig Toshiba 4200 crashed and burned, so after doing some research I replaced it with a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 120gig. Clean format, system runs great - except for the constant, high pitched thrashing noise coming from the drive. Called Seagate, they said it might be faulty, so I returned it to Circuit City and swapped for the same drive...and again, same thing!

    Thing is, the system runs fine, no slowdown - but the noise is horrible, much louder than what I heard with my old drive, even though most reviews mentioned the Seagate being close to silent. Pretty much anything mildly HD intensive causes it: Firewall (due to logging I guess), background anti-virus (not scanning, just monitoring), firefox (writing cache and session store), and any bittorent or P2P clients, etc. I'm using Filemon and see disk activity, but nothing out of the ordinary I think.

    Anyone have the same issue? Any ideas how to deal with it? I'm gonna try putting in a different brand drive to see if things change, but I doubt I got 2 bad drives in a row and otherwise the momentus gets good reviews...is there anyway to dampen the noise? It's driving me off the wall crazy...
     
    iblokh, Jan 21, 2008
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  2. iblokh

    iblokh Notebook Enthusiast

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    PS. I'm going to try mounting a 256mb ram disk and setting all the temp/cache/log folders there to see if it helps. Can't figure out how to change the destination for the firefox bookmark and session backup though.
     
    iblokh, Jan 21, 2008
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  3. Bog

    Bog Losing it...

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    Are you running Vista? If so, try disabling all indexing features. MS's new OS is tough on hard drives in that it not only creates a record of everything on your hard disk for faster searching, but it also caches application data until it has used ALL you RAM (this is a service called SuperFetch). This usually means that a new Vista install will grind your hard drive for several days before it indexes your entire drive, and it will do the same thing every time you start it up until it has used all of your RAM.

    Oops, I just noticed you are using XP. Sorry.

    If its XP, then there aren't many possible causes for such a problem; either the drive is defective or the entire model line has problems.
     
    Bog, Jan 21, 2008
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  4. moon angel

    moon angel Notebook Virtuoso NBR Reviewer

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    It could be the batch circuit city have. I'd return it and buy from another vendor.
     
    moon angel, Jan 22, 2008
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