Seagate barracude 7200.7 plus 120 gb seeks when idle

[Halfgaar]

Hi,

I just bought a new Seagate 120GB 7200.7 Plus drive. It has a strange
problem. When it's idle for about 20 seconds or so, it starts seeking for a
time, or until the drive is accessed again. It is not software which is
causing it, seeing as how it also does it when it's not mounted in Linux,
or when I let met LiLo boot (linux loader) wait to boot anything. The
manual says something about that powerusage and soundproduction can
occainonly increase when idle, because SMART values are being determined.
Perhaps this is what they mean.

I read in a dutch forum that other people have this problem as well, but I
haven't found a sollution. Does anybody here have this problem and know for
sure what is? A fix would be welcome as well

I emailed to seagate support, but I got a standard reply about that
harddrives make seek noises, and that when it's a grinding noise, the drive
may be damaged bla bla bla. I replied to that message, explaining again
that it's not a normal situation, and I got the exact same reply as before.
I replied again, still waiting for an answer. In the mean time, I thought
I'd ask here.

TIA

Halfgaar

 

[jamotto]

Hi,

I just bought a new Seagate 120GB 7200.7 Plus drive. It has a strange
problem. When it's idle for about 20 seconds or so, it starts seeking for a
time, or until the drive is accessed again. It is not software which is
causing it, seeing as how it also does it when it's not mounted in Linux,
or when I let met LiLo boot (linux loader) wait to boot anything. The
manual says something about that powerusage and soundproduction can
occainonly increase when idle, because SMART values are being determined.
Perhaps this is what they mean.

I read in a dutch forum that other people have this problem as well, but I
haven't found a sollution. Does anybody here have this problem and know for
sure what is? A fix would be welcome as well

I emailed to seagate support, but I got a standard reply about that
harddrives make seek noises, and that when it's a grinding noise, the drive
may be damaged bla bla bla. I replied to that message, explaining again
that it's not a normal situation, and I got the exact same reply as before.
I replied again, still waiting for an answer. In the mean time, I thought
I'd ask here.

TIA

Halfgaar

You can turn off SMART in the computers bios.

Also it could be that it's writing data to the harddrive. The write
cache will wait until some idle time before dumping data from the
cache to the harddrive.

 

[Halfgaar]

You can turn off SMART in the computers bios.

Strangely enough, I can't disable SMART in my BIOS. But, I can disable it
using a linux tool. It has no effect.

Also it could be that it's writing data to the harddrive. The write
cache will wait until some idle time before dumping data from the
cache to the harddrive.

My harddrive has a susstained transfer rate of 55 mb/s. Flushing 8 mb of
cache doens't take minutes and it doesn't have to do that over and over
again when the computer is idle.

I've read somewhere in an old forum-post that new seagate drives perform
self-tests in the first few hours of their life. I can't find sources to
either confirm or deny this. Can anyone tell me something about it?

 

[V W Wall]

I've read somewhere in an old forum-post that new seagate drives perform
self-tests in the first few hours of their life. I can't find sources to
either confirm or deny this. Can anyone tell me something about it?

I have the 80GB version (ST380013A), of the same drive with no such problem.
The OS is Win98FE. Did not see any indication of self-tests. It does have
"SMART", which my BIOS does not enable directly.

Have you tried running SeaTools Desktop on the drive? It should be on the
CD that came with the drive, or can be downloaded from the Seagate site.

Virg Wall
--

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

 

[Halfgaar]

I have the 80GB version (ST380013A), of the same drive with no such
problem.
The OS is Win98FE. Did not see any indication of self-tests. It does
have "SMART", which my BIOS does not enable directly.

How noisy is your system? Because the seeknoises of this can hardly be
heard, I would guess the seek sound when idle is only audible in quite
systems.

Have you tried running SeaTools Desktop on the drive? It should be on the
CD that came with the drive, or can be downloaded from the Seagate site.

Virg Wall

I haven't run SeaTools. I'll try it, but I don't think it will fix anything
or show problems Other people who had this problem did try seatools, and it
didn't find anything.

 

[V W Wall]

How noisy is your system? Because the seeknoises of this can hardly be
heard, I would guess the seek sound when idle is only audible in quite
systems.

I have a very quiet system and haven't heard any drive activity. The LED
also does not show any unexpected activity.

I haven't run SeaTools. I'll try it, but I don't think it will fix anything
or show problems Other people who had this problem did try seatools, and it
didn't find anything.

The latest version (V2.00.09) seems to have problems of its own. The prior
version (V 1.06) is available, but not in the English version. It did find
a problem on my drive which scandisk cured. I did not try the full surface
scan which is included in both versions. Might be worth a try.

Virg Wall
--

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

 

[Halfgaar]

I have a very quiet system and haven't heard any drive activity. The LED
also does not show any unexpected activity.

The LED also doesn't light up here. The drive is acting of it's own accord.
The LED indicates data transfer, which in this case obviously isn't there.

The latest version (V2.00.09) seems to have problems of its own. The
prior
version (V 1.06) is available, but not in the English version. It did
find
a problem on my drive which scandisk cured. I did not try the full
surface
scan which is included in both versions. Might be worth a try.

2.00.09 worked fine. It didn't find any problems, but I didn't run the full
test. My Linux smart utility says that a full test takes 83 minutes, and I
didn't feel like waiting.

If you need an older version of seatools, I think I still have an English
version somewhere on CD. I don't know which version it is, but I do know
it's 1.x, since it fits on one floppy

 

[V W Wall]

The LED also doesn't light up here. The drive is acting of it's own accord.
The LED indicates data transfer, which in this case obviously isn't there.

Your drive has two platters, and hence four heads, vs the single platter in
my 80GB drive. Maybe I just don't hear any activity. I just now aplied a
stethoscope to the drive casing. Heard only the drive bearings, no head
activity.

2.00.09 worked fine. It didn't find any problems, but I didn't run the full
test. My Linux smart utility says that a full test takes 83 minutes, and I
didn't feel like waiting.

Precisely the reason I didn't try it, although 80GB would take less time.

If you need an older version of seatools, I think I still have an English
version somewhere on CD. I don't know which version it is, but I do know
it's 1.x, since it fits on one floppy.

Thanks, but I have a copy which I downloaded before the new version came
out. The old one identified Linux partitions and Linux swap on a slave WD
drive correctly. The new one showed them only as "unknown". It also wrote
the report to my "B:\" drive, rather than to the "A:\" drive containing
SeaTools. The test results themselves may be OK for both versions.

Please report back if you find the problem. I'm curious!

Virg Wall
--

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

 

[Halfgaar]

Your drive has two platters, and hence four heads, vs the single platter
in
my 80GB drive. Maybe I just don't hear any activity. I just now aplied a
stethoscope to the drive casing. Heard only the drive bearings, no head
activity.

Hmm. How long did you wait? I haven't measured it, but I read a post on a
forum that said that every 7 minutes it started to seek for 1 minute.
Although I believe my disk does it more often.

Please report back if you find the problem. I'm curious!

Well, my newsgroup program removes read posts which are 30 days old. I hope
I have something to say before then. And do you keep checking that long ?

I do have this, an answer from seagate:

==
The drive will go thru a self-diagnostic for about the first 6 to 8
hours of operation to determine if anything is wrong. It will do this during
the idle periods. Once the diagnostic is complete the seeking will end
except when being accessed by the Operating system.
==

I'm a bit concerned that this is an anser just to get rid of me. I asked
them about a possible self test and they may just have thought "well, let's
just say that it performs a self test so he'll shut up". I should have
asked a more general question.

The knowledge of this selftest came from an old forum post, two years old.
Someone said that seagate drives perform selftests for about the first two
weeks of their life. In a recent post on that same forum, someone with
drives of about two weeks old reported still having the problem. That post
was 10 days old. I replied to the post asking if his drive still seeks when
idle, but I think the topic-starter isn't watching it anymore.

 

[martinlk]

I bought the Barracuda IV a couple of years ago and it also had the
annoying noise that would occur after a minute or so of idle time. I
was very annoyed with this, but after a week or so it just disappeared.
Never heard it since. I recommended the drive to a friend of mine and
he experienced the exact same thing, where the noise would simply
disappear after a short period of time and never return again. This
could very well mean that there is some sort of diagnostics going on in
the first hours of operation.

Now I've bought a 120GB Barracuda 7200.7 and it also has the annoying
seek noise that appears after a minute (or less) of idle time. I've had
the drive installed in my server for a couple of months now and the
noise is still there. It just doesn't seem to go away on the "new"
7200.7 models. Just as you, I'm very interested in finding out if there
is a way out of this problem.

 

[trfr]

Same problem here. The 160GB 7200.7 Barracuda has been seeking while
idle for the last 2 months.

 

[kony]

Same problem here. The 160GB 7200.7 Barracuda has been seeking while
idle for the last 2 months.

You're sure it's the drive? That is, you've cloned the OS
to another drive and put the clone in it's place and the
behavior stopped? I'd be suspecting it's the OS or one of
your apps if you haven't ruled those out yet.