Legacy Network Products

[augieman]

Hello,

I have had a Maxtor Central Axis for about a month now and it just started producing a high pitch whistle that is very annoying. Each time I hear the whistle I also hear a mechanical noise as if the hard drive is being accessed and the hard drive light flickers. Interestingly enough I am not accessing the hard drive whilke this is happenoing and I have backup set to 3:00 am and I am hearing this noise at 11:45 pm.

Two questions:

1) Has anyone else heard this high pitch whistle and deoes anyone know what it is ?

2) Any ideas as tohy the hard would be being accessed when I am not doing it myself, nor is any other program that I know of ? I thought perhaps someone had hacked inot it since I have web access enabled but it continued to do this even after I physically disconnected it from my router.

I do not have a lot of confidence in Maxtor at the momemt as my 6 month old One Touch 4 mini external hard drive, which contained ALL of my work files, just crashed thisd morning. Aftre holding for an hour for tech support I was told that I cold purchase Maxtor's data recovery software for $129.00.

Thanks,

Steve Carr

[kitanaiyatsu]

There are only two things that can make a high pitched whistling sound in a MCA... the fan and the disk.  Either will cause a problem.  If the fan is producing noise, it's also producing heat... probably more heat than it's getting rid of.  If the disk is making the noise... that's more urgent.

Either way... I'd _quickly_ backup the data to something else as the MCA is probably going to die soon.

Also...

Data recovery software is only good if your disk is still working.  $129 for software isn't going to get you much if the disk isn't spinning up.  If your disk isn't accessable to your computer without the software... it's still not going to be accessable with the software.  If the data is really important, not backed up, and not reproduceable, the only solution is going to be hardware based.

First... check to make sure it's not a power supply issue.  While the disk it's self is made by Seagate and may be very reliable... the power supply is probably made by "Joe's Pretty Good Power Suply Company."  In my 25+ years of experience... I've had a few dozen power supplies go bad... and only a few hard drives.  I think the OT4 has an internal power converter inside the case that changes the single voltage into the 3 voltages the drive needs.  Those can die also.

If the power supply is good, then you'll probably have to send the drive somewhere that will take it apart and put the platters onto another spindle.  That can get spendy though.

BTW... the MCA came with pretty nice backup software.  If the data on hte OT4 is important... why didn't you use the MCA to do backup's?