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

[adeckofhands]

Hi,

Under 6 months of getting my 2TB Seagate Barrcuda Green SATA drive it started beeping.

When the drive started beeping i lost access to it, but after a period of beeping it would become responsive again. This was infrequent at first but became much more frequent after a while. Then one day it wouldn't stop beeping. So assuming the hard drive was dying i unpluged it. I can still access the data by plugging it in and if it doesn't beep... I'm lucky!

I assumed that this is the "chirping" people talk about on here that mean the drives dead. But thought i would check before sending it back. As the data was not of severe importance and i had more pressing issues I have left it for quite a while before attempting to fix the issue.

I do not have a backup of the data yet but am planning on buying a NAS drive which i can store any important data i can salvage from the drive on before sending the drive back.

I have tried to run SeaTools but when running it the tool reaches the stage (almost instantly) of "SCSI: Scanning for supported drives. Please wait..." and becomes non responsive. But this seems to be related to my computer more than the drive as even with the drive unplugged and it attempting to detect my other Seagate drive it fails at this point.

Thank you for any assistance you can offer.

[adeckofhands]

I have plugged the drive back in again to record the beeping noise.

I have attached it below, after looking at some videos of other chirping hard drives i am not convinced my problem is the same.

The beeping is regular but also has gaps in certain places. Apologies for the background noise.

Edit: I also found the corrent model number on the drive, it is ST2000DL003

[adeckofhands]

In an effort to fix this problem I have ordered a new 2TB drive from Seagate to replace this drive. Decided to go for the standard 7200rpm version instead of the green version I originally bought.

I will attempt to retrieve the data off the drive when it arrives then I guess I will have to RMA the drive.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what I should put on the RMA? Beeping? Squeaking?

Or does anyone have any other recommendations?

Thank you!

[MapleTree]

Hello,

If the drive needs to be returned. You can process the drive as a "dead drive".  If you cannot test with Seatools, there is an option when creating the RMA to choose" I do not have a test code". Then there is a list of codes that you can choose.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

[adeckofhands]

Thanks for the reply!

I gave SeaTools another go, Used the DOS version this time just to be sure.

After a couple of times with the drive not being recognized I managed to run a short test.

Got the test code: Removed as Unnecessary.

Looking for that in google gave 1 hit to a french site which when opened was an error page.

I don't know if test codes are unique? I assumed not.

Edit: Removed test code

[fzabkar]

adeckofhands, SeaTools test codes are indeed unique. They are an encrypted hexadecimal number derived from the drive's serial number and the number of the failing test.

See http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/270338-32-st3500418as-firmware-cc38-driver-download

[adeckofhands]

Thanks fzabkar,

Guess best thing to do then would be to try and retrieve data off the drive, then return the drive under that code.

I will run a more comprehensive test before returning the drive, however i don't want to keep running the drive until i have recovered the data incase this causes further problems.

Either way a few days and i will test the drive and return it, but have a feeling its dead. When trying to check using Seatools it beeped for quite a while!

[adeckofhands]

Got my replacement drive and have copied a good deal of data over to it. Once it has finished i will run a seatools long test on the drive to see whats happening.

Strangly it seems to copy a great number of files without trouble. But other files there is beeping and the copying slows down dramatically. However the copying has yet to stop, each time there is a beep the speed just drops from ~120MB/s to ~6MB/s.

Not sure what would cause such a thing. Will i get any news from seagate about what is wrong with the drive? Or will it be a straight replacement? Just i am intrigued about what is wrong with the device.

[vsm1966]

Replacement the HD as soon as possible and do not trust Seatool, the seatool will say that the HD is in perfect condition, until one day turn on the computer and no longer works.

Replacement  the HD is the only solution, as many times as necessary until you send an HD without problems.

Do not be fooled.