beep from Seagate Momentus XT

Hmm, so (one of?) the XTs (500GB) in my M6400 beeps sometimes. It's happened very rarely, maybe three times so far (well, as far as I know), on three different days, but I wonder if this is a sign of trouble. I have no event log errors anywhere, and the drives are otherwise fast, quiet, and smooth. The beeps have always occured while the drives were (probably) idle, and the computer is cool and idle as well, so there should be no temperature issue. They sound almost like the beep coming from a tiny speaker, but I am certain it did come from one of the drives. Anybody know anything about this?

 

My Momentus had a free fall sensor that beeps when activated. Should have anything to worry about. Just don't move your laptop too quickly, it can be very sensitive. That is if you have a free fall sensor. Don't know if the hybrid has one or not. I do know it has a 5-year warranty so you have nothing to worry about.

 

Yeah, I have seen posts of people hearing the beeps from drives with FFS (big deal for a while with MacBook Pros, it seems). I'm not sure either if the XTs have these sensors as well, and in any case the machine was docked, so the sensor should not react. However, those MacBooks had a similar issue, too, while being entirely stationary.

P.S.: I checked Seagate's materials on the XT, and they don't mention free-fall protection in their overview or specs, but the manual mentions commands for enabling/disabling free-fall protection support. So maybe the drive does have that feature, but I'm still not entirely sure. Those commands may be there even though the drive does not support them. The FFS drives used to have an "ASG" designation, rather than the "AS" that my drives have.

 

Yeah I remember all that nonsense too. G stands for gravity or something. G-protection. Doesn't matter really.

If you don't have the FFS then it's something else. Another problem some Momentus drives used to have was a power management issue. I'd hope they would have ironed that out by now with updated firmware, but Seagate cranks out a lot of drives. Too many to make each one perfect.

This suggestion may sound silly, but try running SeaTools. If you get some bad sectors, you have something to worry about. If it comes back clean, I'd say it's nothing. Maybe just a hiccup between Windows and the drive.

 

I could do that if this becomes more frequent, but the drives are in RAID, so it's a huge hassle running diagnostic tools like that on the drives: I'll have to take them out of the laptop and install them in a different machine in order to test them. I'll just keep watching the situation, and see how things go. I seem to remember having had a similar behavior a few years ago with a different machine, and the beeps happened a couple of times and then never came back.

 

I always just assumed it was power related on some level because like you said, I could be doing nothing and the beep would just come out of nowhere. I had mine in a raid 0 as well. Once I went back to a single drive setup it stopped beeping as often. Maybe it's a problem with the SATA bus on laptops. Someone a lot smarter than me would have to figure it out I'm afraid. Especially since I sold that laptop and I can't do raid in my G73JH.

The big difference with mine though is that the beep would sometimes be associated with a slight freeze of the OS. The freeze lasted only a second or two, but it was enough to cause alarm. I ended up RMA'ing one of the two drives I had in raid. Since I've got it back I haven't even taken the darn thing out of the packaging.

I hope you don't have the same problem in the future. But if you do at least that warranty covers you for a long time. Out of curiosity, what is your raid controller? I think I had an IHC9.

 

your laptop keeps having problems... but this is weird.. nver had a laptop drive beep.

 

All of my 7200.4's would beep when the heads got parked because the freefall sensor tripped. Either beep then, or when power was abruptly cut, like when holding the power button for 5secs. The Momentus XT is just a repurposed 7200.4 with a different controller board.... That's why I never bought one. I'll stick with my 7k500's thank-you very much. Two 7200.4's have already failed on me, and I don't want anymore.

 

Not really, no. I wouldn't classify that beeping as a problem, so far. It hasn't done it in two days now. You may be thinking of my travel laptop, the M4500 that bluescreens with that SSD. This one is now running on a Momentus XT, and humming along just fine. More generally, I have never had any real problems with any of my Dell Precisions. They're not cheap, but it's excellent hardware.

 

hmm, just want to ask (i apologize if its off-topic) hows the performance increase when installed in the notebook? I mean like...im currently using hdd for my G51vx, but really planning on swapping to a higher performance hdd, ex: momentus xt?