HD rattles when shaken

  • Thread starter Thread starter Franc Zabkar
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Franc Zabkar

I notice that some modern HDs rattle when shaken.

Is this the sound of the head stack moving about on the loading ramp?

- Franc Zabkar
 
I notice that some modern HDs rattle when shaken.

Is this the sound of the head stack moving about on the loading ramp?
Click to expand...

From what I've seen of HDD guts, it would be the air-powered head
parker arm -- it's a plastic part that is pushed out of the way by
the airstream from spinning disk.

When the drive is not powered, the heads are stuck to the platters,
not likely to rattle as it takes a fair force to move them. This
is likely why HDDs have a spinup count limit -- unsticking the heads.

Not that I've opened a recent HDD (many years), they don't fail as
often as the older ones :)

That's my guess, if the rattle sounds like a loose plastic part.

Grant.
 
From what I've seen of HDD guts, it would be the air-powered head
parker arm -- it's a plastic part that is pushed out of the way by
the airstream from spinning disk.

When the drive is not powered, the heads are stuck to the platters,
not likely to rattle as it takes a fair force to move them. This
is likely why HDDs have a spinup count limit -- unsticking the heads.

Not that I've opened a recent HDD (many years), they don't fail as
often as the older ones :)

That's my guess, if the rattle sounds like a loose plastic part.

Grant.
Click to expand...

I know that older drives park their heads on the platters, but current
drives retract them off the surface and park them on a loading ramp.

Here is a Hitachi white paper that illustrates this:
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...5825FB/$file/LoadUnload_white_paper_FINAL.pdf

- Franc Zabkar
 
Grant wrote
From what I've seen of HDD guts, it would be the air-powered
head parker arm -- it's a plastic part that is pushed out of the
way by the airstream from spinning disk.
Click to expand...
When the drive is not powered, the heads are stuck to the platters,
Click to expand...

Heads havent landed on the platters for years now.
not likely to rattle as it takes a fair force to move them. This is
likely why HDDs have a spinup count limit -- unsticking the heads.
Click to expand...
Not that I've opened a recent HDD (many years),
Click to expand...

Thats obvious.
 
Franc said:
I notice that some modern HDs rattle when shaken.

Is this the sound of the head stack moving about on the loading ramp?
Click to expand...


It's an audible warning device meaning: "You're not supposed to be
shaking this thing. Stop immediately."


Perce
 
Franc Zabkar said:
I notice that some modern HDs rattle when shaken.

Is this the sound of the head stack moving about on the loading ramp?
Click to expand...

Why shake it? It's a HDD not a maraca.
 
Why shake it? It's a HDD not a maraca.
Click to expand...

I'm posting this question on behalf of a poster in a Seagate forum who
is having problems with his HDD. He noticed the rattling noise. I then
tested my own drives and found only one that rattled, a 320GB Seagate
PATA drive. My rattling drive has no history of problems and has a
clean SMART log. To allay the poster's concerns I suggested that the
reason that earlier models did not rattle may be that the heads parked
on the platters whereas current designs retract them onto a loading
ramp. BTW, the noise sounds metallic, not plastic.

- Franc Zabkar
 
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