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

[Ajiki-kun]

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Agent24 wrote

Go Barracuda XT or something else. Personally, I've got my eye on Hitachi... just waiting for the prices to get a bit lower, darn those floods!

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I thought you were making a pun, but upon closer inspection, that is an "r" and an "n", not an "m".

Seagate is entertaining a request for a different model to replace my ST2000DM001, but there's nothing in that price range without losing performance... what do you guys think I should do?

[Booki]

Just purchased two ST2000DM001's, one for myself the other for my brother.

Both are making these chiping/beeping noises as described. Quite dissapointed in seagate, but if they can assure they don't effect longetivy of the drive, the noise doesn't bother me too much.

Alas there should be a way to turn it off.

Pick up your game seagate, i specifically went for your drive over other competitors, so much for customer loyalty.

[Nessy]

Seagate hasn't assured me of anything. They just want me to ship them a drive, at my expense, so they can ship me another equally defective drive. Their attempts to address these concerns seems non-existent to me.

[josephb4823]

Seagate, I'm begging you, please allow us to permanently adjust and disable APM to stop the chirping caused by the parking and unparking of the heads. Please!!!

[Agent24]

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josephb4823 wrote:

Seagate, I'm begging you, please allow us to permanently adjust and disable APM to stop the chirping caused by the parking and unparking of the heads. Please!!!

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I'm going to guess that the reason they don't release a fix to permanently disable this 'feature' is because it's actually necessary somehow.

Remember the old IBM Deskstars? Part of the problem with them was that the heads didn't move around enough and caused excessive wear in areas leading to failure - they released a firmware fix to move the heads more and try to prevent the problem.

They also said not to run the drives for more than a few hours per day.

You may notice in the documentation for these consumer-grade Seagate drives:

"AFR and MTBF specifications are based on the following assumptions for desktop personal computer environ-

ments:
• 2400 power-on-hours per year."

Note that this works out to only 6.5 hours per day.

I am going to guess (but of course I may be completely wrong) that these Seagate drives require the 'chirping' and whatever else associated with it to occur for increased reliability.

So, disabling it may not be a good idea.

[Ajiki-kun]

I don't know if this will be any consolation to anyone, but I ditched the ST2000DM001, and got an older ST32000641AS (Barracuda XT). Works like a charm; this is the Seagate I remember -- quality at a good price.

I'm sitting out this round of 1TB/platter or 4KB sector or whatever. I'll wait the however many years it takes for Seagate to sort out this new tech, since they can't get it to run properly or quietly.

Ditto what above posters have said - if you have one of the STx000DM drives, and the noise/load count bothers you, RMA it. But don't count on it getting any better on its own or through firmware. Seagate has a pretty nice service department (who did good by me), but I have to say, their technicians/designers rushed this and we paid the price.

So long all! 'Till next we meet!

[husky55]

hdparm  !!! Google it if you are not familiar with it!!!  Can be used in both linux and windows.

[portomomo]

HDPARM is just a temporary solution. Everytime you power down the HDD the setting is lost. At the next restart, you will have the default (preprogrammed in firmware) value.

[ScooterMcGav]

Well, I finally got the firmware updated on all 4 of my ST2000DM001 drives, put them back into my QNAP NAS and did the initialize, format & raid 5 again.

I can confirm that the chirping noise is STILL there and just as frequent but not as loud as it was before, It's still at an audible level though and very annoying being in the same room as my TV. I haven't checked the LCC but I imagine it will be just like everyone elses.

Cheers

Scooter

[Nessy]

Has anyone RMA'd and received something back other than the 001s wih the problems?