Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Atherinas]

Greetings.

I've recently purchased a new Barracuda Green 1,5TB SATA drive (ST1500DL003-9VT16L).

This was intended to be used as a multimedia storage drive(music,videos etc). I partitioned the disk in 3 pieces,and started copying files.

It all was working well,until at some point about 2-3 weeks later,i noticed a weird beeping sound coming from the tower.

More on that : It is a beep not similar to that of the internal speaker,its a bit lower in frequency,and not as loud.Opening the pc case,and trying to listen carefully,i'm almost 90% sure it came from the hard drives location( the other one is a Seagate 500GB sata one,7200),even if still noone i know has ever heard of a hard disk "Beeping".

Let me say again,its not a pop-click sound (i've heard plenty of those)

The beeping was not stable in frequency either.Some times it was 5 min intervals,other times 5-10 seconds intervals.

At the beginning,while trying to figure out what's wrong,i noticed the sound occurred whenever the drive was in use (meaning i was playing music/videos stored on that drive) .I made it 100% sure it was from the new disk,when i disconnected both sata+power cables from it,and didn't hear a single beep for a month.

Some more points i've noticed: The drive can beep even with only the power cable connected,and both in windows OR BIOS (which i think takes software problems out).

Finally,the drive passes all SeaTools Test but the Long Generic one,which I've run twice,both times beeps occurred,and pc crashed at some point (BSOD,i have the codes).

The drive is still in warranty by the store i purchased it,but I'd really like to find out what's wrong.

So...Does anyone have ANY idea what might be wrong here?

Thanks a lot in advance for any help.

[AlanM]

Could you please post a more complete list of your computer's specifications, particularly the power supply?

[Atherinas]

Although the PC is faurly old,its running on:
550W PSU(dont think i can tell more about it )

AMD Athlon 3200+

1x ST3200320AS 500GB Seagate SATA HDD (60-410 GB partitions,7200 i think)

1x ST1500DL003-9VT Seagate SATA HDD (problem disk,488-488-420GB partitions)

Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 motherboard

3GB RAM (2x1GB,2x512MB ,dont know clocks)

Geforce 6600GT,swapped to a Geforce 7600GS a week ago,but disk problem appeared way before that.

Windows7.

The pc has worked with 4 IDE HDDs in the past,and besides a printer,only other USB device is the occational camera-phone etc.

Hope this helps

[Cantbecanit]

550w and old would be my suspect.

Really need a brand, is it in a gold coloured case by any chance?

Likely to be a Qtec if it is, they made 500+w models way back when most were still feeding the market a 350w unit, another duffer unit is Hiper, again ranked up in the league of numbers but reality is different, the Qtec rated at 550w could just about muster 250w real world terms iirc, still have one in my spares box, had some very unstable PC's while it was fitted as well.

Would really help if you could discover a brand name on it even if you have to remove it to do so.

[Atherinas]

The only thing i could find on a sticker that looks like a brand name is "Tecnoware" (i'm ashamed to type it )

Looks like your typical "out of the basket" PSU,but as i mentioned earlier,this has run for years with 4-5 drives attached without problems.

Kinda strikes me as weird to go bad now,with only 2 HDDs on (no optical drives).

[Noel Brain]

I too have a Barracuda Green which beeps. Its almost like the beep from the PC but softer and different pitch. At the same time, you can hear the hard disk arm clicking. After a while it stops beeping and spins down.

The disk is not recognised at all now. It is about 3 months old and was working fine prior to this

Hope someone has some suggestions

I have read somewhere about stiction and knocking the drive. Woth a try?

Thanks in advance

[Noel Brain]

Here is the link and the post http://forum.hddguru.com/samsung-portable-500gb-dead-t14351.html#p99445 Anyhow ... as somebody reply before ... be advised that you can make more mess then recovery in this action ... so ... it is up to you ... in my case I did not care much about louse the warranty ... and I did know that it would have been complicated and expensive for me find a different way to recover data ... So ... this is exactly what I did ... honestly I dont remember the exact direction I did use for "shock" my HD .. but this is how I did: - I was keeping it in one hand, and immediately after plug the usb for power it up ... I did move the hand with my HD to hit my other hand that was still ... making around 20-30cm movement with my hand with the HD on it ... so the shock was not too hard - The movement direction was keeping the HD flat ... so the show was only in the horizontal direction ... you don't want to shock the HD up/down ... you just want it to move horizontal ... in the same direction that the head of the HD is allowed to move ------ | | | | | | ----> | | | | ------ So In case the above skema direction help ... this is the direction of the movement ... Good luck e_lm_70