harddrive noise

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 4:30 pm

my harddrive makes a sound like high pressuer gas is escapeing from it. this happens at random times it could be during video compression or while its just sitting idle. sometimes it will crash my system but sometimes it just makes the noise and keeps going. its a maxtor 120gig 7200rpm. what is wrong with it? should i send it back to them for a repair or a new one? should i be worried about it breaking totaly and back up my data daily?

narcted · Post by **narcted** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 5:41 pm

The hermetic seal could be breached. Could mean dust or other contaminents got in. Likewise the read head could actually be making contact with the disk plates. The read head actually should skin the surface about 4-10 nm above the plate. My Maxtor 4GB (yeah, way back when I was using and AMD K6 100) made hissing sound before it finally died. Maxtor has a one year warranty, I think.

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Mon Mar 15, 2004 5:51 pm

yea they do but i was hopeing it wasnt anything serious. guess its serious then

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 5:38 am

What could be considered a pressurized sound is the drive shutting off. You could test and see if this is the sound you're getting by setting your Power settings to turn the disk off in "5 minutes" then waiting the five minutes(make sure no apps that use the disk are running) and see if you hear the sound.

If it's making this sound while the disk is being accessed, then the disk is shutting down when being witten to. This is troubling espcially if it is crashing your computer. Download the PowerDrive(think that's what it's called) software off Maxtor's website.

I've gone through about four or five Maxtor hard drives, starting with the original two. So yeah, I am not too thrilled with their reliability...

-klinky

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:48 am

well i submitted an RMA and maxtor is corss shipping me a new one. thanx for the help

bum · Post by **bum** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:44 pm

generaly when a hard disk starts making a wierd noise the first thing to do is to BACK UP THAT HARD DISK NOW

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 8:10 pm

i got the new hdd today and i put it in my comp with the old one that makes the noise and shuts off sometimes and the new one is not recognized by windows. my motherboard see it fine but windows dose not

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 9:48 pm

Your harddrive should have come with an installation disk...

I got a harddrive from someone who thought it was defective once. Turns out he bought it on e-bay and it didn't come with the installation software. I had a disk from a previous install so I ran that and everything was good after that.

Go here for a maxtor drive for the installation software if you don't have the disk.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downlo ... blast3.htm

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 10:37 pm

they didnt ship me the disk but i just used the win2k cd to windows format the harddrive (like bum suggested) and it worked. now its just a matter of copying all my files over

bum · Post by **bum** » Sat Mar 20, 2004 3:25 pm

actualy i told you to use the winxp disk