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Byte
tacosauce
Posts: 9
Registered: ‎08-25-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

Yeah, I usually use the computer for a about 8 hours a day. I'm a programmer and use this machine at work since our IT dept only provides Dell, so when it's in use it's pretty active running a virtual pc with server 2003, sharepoint, sqlserver, and visual studio 2008.  You can imagine how annoying hard drive problems can be in I/O sensitive situations like this.   At night, I usually set it up to crunch numbers while I sleep so it sees a lot of on time.  This past month I was on vacation for 3 weeks so I didn't use it as much or keep it on.  The only problem I have with the suggested fix is that if I want to use the battery, the hard drive with suck down the power.  I pinged newegg again and hopefully they will have a heart and offer a refund.  If not, I'll have to get a replacement drive from seagate and I'll try the suggested workaround.
Petabyte
HughR
Posts: 421
Registered: ‎01-01-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

tacosauce:

Why would you wish to RMA the disk (and just get back another of the same model)?  I don't see anything actually wrong with this particular disk.  Sure, you might have a better experience with a different model.

 

There are a bunch of possible values for the APM setting.  Maybe some of them behave optimally for your purposes.

Yottabyte
fzabkar
Posts: 4,647
Registered: ‎01-27-2009

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

I realise that this thread has gone stale, but I thought I'd make some observations anyway.

 

The Load Cycle Count is 11336, but your Start/Stop Count is only 94. The cooked value of the former has already dropped from 100 to 95, after only 356 powered-on hours. At this rate you will hit 0 in about 7000 hours (= 19 x 356).

 

Attribute 188 is indicating 4 Command Timeouts.

 

Attributes 240, 241, and 242 appear to be multi-byte values that are probably best observed in hexadecimal.

 

240 -> 8203387535671 -> 0x077600000137

241 -> 1507067261 -> 0x000059d4057d

242 -> 749646730 -> 0x00002caeb38a

 

Attribute 240 (Head Flying Hours) appears to consist of two values, 0x0776 and 0x0137 (or 0x00000137).

 

Now 0x0137 = 311 decimal, and Power_On_Hours = 356. I'm guessing that this means that the heads were over the platters for 311 hours out of the 356 hours that the drive was powered up, and were parked for the remaining 45 hours.

 

Attribute 190 (Airflow Temperature) seems to be directly related to attribute 194 (Temperature_Celsius):

 

42 + 58 = 100

44 + 56 = 100

 

The raw Seek Error Rate figure reflects 0 errors in 9377755 seeks, ie a perfect score.

 

Here is an example showing 1 error in 4 million seeks:

 

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=8732#M8732 

 

The cooked value of Raw_Read_Error_rate is 111 which is also very good. The raw value of 36984705 is not an error rate -- it is a sector count. My understanding is that Seagate computes the error rate by counting the number of read errors in each block of 250 million sectors. The sector count then rolls over to 0 and continues counting up to 250 million. The cooked value is incremented or decremented according to the number of errors detected in each block.

 

 

Byte
tacosauce
Posts: 9
Registered: ‎08-25-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

Sorry for a delayed response, I wanted to RMA the disk so that I could get a new one, which i could either hold on to until apple lets me put their firmware on the drive, or to sell on craigslist and recoup some of my cost of buying an "incompatible" hard drive.  I explained my situation to newegg and they decided to take the drive back and credit my account.  I'm very luck, but now running on a 320gb 5400rpm drive.  I'll most likely wait till I can read more feedback about all the 500gb drives available.  Thanks for all the help everybody has offered.   

 

Visitor
sitecr2
Posts: 2
Registered: ‎09-09-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

macbook pro 2.53 - 1 partition w/ OS 10.6 (even w/ it brand new format and min apps it still freezes/beachball) and 1 partition w/ vista up to date. vista side not as many freezes but on mac side many (then again i use mac mainly) 

have tried turning off stuff, fan under the laptop, deleting caches. nothing works and the apple firmware won't work on this hard drive.

need some help badly.

ddt 

Byte
tacosauce
Posts: 9
Registered: ‎08-25-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

You're sol, seagate has reported that these drives are incompatible with a macbook pro without the apple firmware.  You can read the thread about it and my experiences.  You will need to RMA it to wherever you bought it, or to seagate for a new drive which you can sell to a buddy to help recoup the cost of buying an "incompatible" product.  
Petabyte
HughR
Posts: 421
Registered: ‎01-01-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise



sitecr2 wrote:

macbook pro 2.53 - 1 partition w/ OS 10.6 (even w/ it brand new format and min apps it still freezes/beachball) and 1 partition w/ vista up to date. vista side not as many freezes but on mac side many (then again i use mac mainly) 

have tried turning off stuff, fan under the laptop, deleting caches. nothing works and the apple firmware won't work on this hard drive.

need some help badly.

ddt 


If you have the clicking problem described in the first post, I recommend you read the rest of the thread.  You will find where I point to a possible fix.  Try that and report back.

 

If you don't have that problem, start a new thread: this one isn't for you.

 

Byte
nevdull
Posts: 19
Registered: ‎02-06-2008
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

I have a 3.0 Ghz Macbook Pro.  While I did do the firmware update on my machine, the drive cycling and parking noises did in fact stop so that worked fine.  However, now, I'm getting the dreaded beachball freeze.  That wasn't happening before and looking at my activity monitor on the machine and checking a few cycles, it is the drive that is stopping.  

 

I'm think now that the new Hitachi 7200 2.5 500 GB drives will be out shortly and I'll move over to one of those and put this into a firewire case for backup only.   It's not a great solution but there isn't much more I can do.  I installed a 320 GB 7200 Hitachi Travelstar drive in my wife's Macbook Pro from last year and it continues to work perfectly without issue.  It's too bad, I've always had good success with the Seagate products but this one is obviously a dud for them.  

Petabyte
HughR
Posts: 421
Registered: ‎01-01-2009
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise


nevdull wrote:

I have a 3.0 Ghz Macbook Pro.  While I did do the firmware update on my machine, the drive cycling and parking noises did in fact stop so that worked fine.  However, now, I'm getting the dreaded beachball freeze.  That wasn't happening before and looking at my activity monitor on the machine and checking a few cycles, it is the drive that is stopping.  

 ...


I'm a little confused.  What firmware update did you do?  As I understand it (and I may be mistaken) the only firmeware upgrade for this problem is from Apple for drives they provided.  Is your drive from Apple?  Or are you talking about another firmware update?  Or am I wrong?

 

Not being a Mac user, I don't know what a beachball is.  Could you explain?

Byte
nevdull
Posts: 19
Registered: ‎02-06-2008
0

Re: ST9500420ASG (Momentus 7200.4) clicking noise

Apologies.....this isn't in the right forum.