Do hard drives get progressively louder/whiner as they age?


I am aking because over the past few months my, once silent, 40gig Maxtor drive has become whiny as hell. It is starting to sound like this old 6giger I have. . .

This happened to another drive (same model) and I just stuck it in a USB encloser.

Both drives work fine. . . just annoying as hell.

And it's not vibration, I just checked the mounting screws. . .and they are fine.

thanks

Personally, if hard drives start getting noisy, that's their warning signal that they're about to die. My recommendation would be to buy a replacement disk this week, and once it arrives, transfer any important data over to it. Then toss the noisy drive into the rubbish heap. Just my 2 cents -- J.W.

Naaw, it depends on how the drive is built, really.

I have seen way too many IBM/Hitachi 2½-inch drives go click-click-click and then Die Horribly within a week or so.

But then again, the SCSI (Quantum|Caviar)? disk in my trusty old Mac SE started making really noticeable whining noises when it was a couple of years old -- yet it's stayed rock solid for years and years after that. Not a single bit error, just the added noise.

That noise is caused by friction, and friction creates heat, and heat kills computer components, so I'd take J.W.'s advice. If your drive is making clicking noises, chances are you kicked it (or exposed it to some kind of severe shock) while spinning and the heads skipped across the platters. They're pretty tough when the heads are parked (off or in suspend/sleep mode) though. I'd be willing to bet that most of those failures occured in PCs installed under somebody's desk or in a laptop that was dropped.

KlaymenDK,

This is what I thought. . . I have an old Mac LC and LC520, both whine like there is no tomorrow but are in great working order. . . no errors, nothing.

Both my my whiny drives are in warranty, so I think I will just have them replaced. Besides, the replacements shuld be a better model anyway. . .


Now, as for replacing a hard drive,
Is there a program that can copy a drive's data, bit by bit, from one drive to another? That way I don't have to reinstall Gentoo. . .

Once had a water pump in a car doing the same thing. Worked fine for a couple years actually, then I completely fried the engine. The bearings in a HDD aren't that much different.

Again, I'll agree with Crito. To be blunt, drives simply are not supposed to make noise. If they do, then by definition that is abnormal behavior, and personally I would not consider a mechanical device that displays abnormal behavior to be OK. Obviously, it's up to the owner of the drive to decide if or how long to continue using it, but if you value your data, I would reiterate my advice to replace it.

As for transferring data from one device to another, I'd recommend using the dd command. See man dd for more details, but the basic format is simply to specify the input file (which would be /dev/hda or whatever) and the output file (which would be /dev/hdc or whatever). -- J.W.

Cool, I will look into the dd thing. . .
and I am getting the RMA ready. . .

Sigh, it will be hard to see my little drive go. . . it has been so good to me over the years.

It has had Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro, RedHat 7.1, 7.2, 9, Slackware 8.1, 9, 9.1, 10, Gentoo 2004.1, and SuSE 9.1 Pro on it in it's lifetime. I wrote my first program on it (hello world, hehe) in java. It has served me well.

Suggestion: as long as the drive is still functioning, and if you will be RMA'ing it, you might want to consider wiping out all the data first, before you ship it. That way you won't risk having any of your personal data (or anything else that exists on the hard drive) end up in someone else's hands. dd is great for doing that too
The above command will overwrite the entire primary master disk with zeroes. (Obviously, running this command is a point of no return. Proceed carefully.) Alternatively, if you wanted to write a random series of 1's and 0's to the disk, you could use /dev/random or /dev/urandom as the input file rather than /dev/zero. -- J.W.