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

[philosopher]

Just adding my drive to the growing count of chirpers...

Model: ST3000DM001-9YN166 * 4

Firmware: CC4C

Platform: Synology 409+

The HDs chirp once a minute........ 

[AlanM]

See it here, please. 

Thank you for your patience!

[cooltempo]

Ok so first up I'd like to thank Alan for letting me know about the firmware update. I have updated all 4 of my drives (2x 2tb and 2x 3tb).

From my experience so far there appears to be good news and bad news. The sound appears to have gone BUT the Load Cycle Counts are still rising for me. In about 2 hours one of my drives in a QNAP NAS went from 19690 to 19728. SO about 20 cycles per hour. This is still alarmingly high.

With APM disbaled this figure stayed more or less the same. I think I say 2 or 3 cycles in the space of a week. Another thing worth noting is that APM is still set to a default of 128. So whatever the firmware has done it certainly hasn't disabled APM.

Has anyone else taken the plunge?  

[Shahin]

I've updated & waiting for the result

how can i check my HDD's load cycles?

Regards

[cooltempo]

Are you on OSX or Windows? Either way what you are looking for is a S.M.A.R.T utiity that will give you a detailed report of the drives state. Within the data list there will be a Load Cycle Count.

I use Smart Utility for OSX, my QNAP NAS has Smart reporting built in and I believe a lot of poeple are using Crystal Disk Info for Windows.

Hope this helps?

[Shahin]

thank you

I use windows

[Agent24]

---

Shahin wrote:

thank you

I use windows

---

Seems most people here use CrystalDisk Info, I personally use SpeedFan (it monitors temperature, fan speed etc as well)

[jologski]

At last!

I successfully installed the firmware update and no more annoying chirps! My Barracuda 3TB is not only fast and spacious, it is now truly quiet.

Nice to see that our calls were heard and the chirp issue addressed. Thanks a lot to all the folks concerned.

[portomomo]

Good news.

During the weekend I'll update the firmware of at last one of my two 2TB drives and let them run in parallel to see

if the rising LOAD_CYCLE_COUNT is comparable between the new and old.

BTW: after less than 1 month of light usage the two disks in the NAS (Raid 1, mirrored) how a LOAD_CYCLE_COUNT of 8393 Cycles wich is very high. More or less 400 cycles/day. Quite a lot.

I've enlarged our debate involving the storage review forum to see if somebody was experiencing the same, somebody said that WD drives had the same issue some time ago, but was resolved

have a look here:

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/30277-new-seagate-1tb-platter-drives/page__st__20

Lets see how thing evolve with the new FW.

Will keep you updated.

[portomomo]

EDIT: Not relevant for this discusson

Just to broaden the discussion a little bit:

I've found (on this forum BTW) a post from user OLNEX:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/High-Load-Cycle-Count-and-Clicking-noise-...

Essentially quoting an Fujitsu tech saying that parking of disk heads is not important for Power Saving but for security reasons to

have the heads parked in case of a power failure.

Furthermore the 600K limit of LOAD_CYCLE_COUNT is a theoretical limit and that this number is reached on normal usage basis  in 4,89 years. Their drives are tested up to 1000K cycles.

I cuoldn't verufy the origin, so don't take it as gold, but it gives some more ideas.

This shows that the "chirp" issue is an old one, and HDD manufacturers are aware of it since 2008, if not earlier.

Some offered solutions (FW updates etc.).

Cheers