My sons SS5 has two Seagate Barracuda drives that sound like an aircraft
getting ready to take off. Are they normally that loud or are they on the
fast track to failure?

Coy

Anthony Mandic wrote:

> Coy Krill wrote:
>>
>> My sons SS5 has two Seagate Barracuda drives that sound like an aircraft
>> getting ready to take off. Are they normally that loud or are they on the
>> fast track to failure?
>
> They shouldn't be very loud. If they are, I'd worry. It may be
> normal for that particular type of disk but I doubt it. If they
> are very old, I'd consider making backups at least.
>
> -am © 2003

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for the confirmation.

Coy

Coy Krill wrote:
>
> Anthony Mandic wrote:
>
> > Coy Krill wrote:
> >>
> >> My sons SS5 has two Seagate Barracuda drives that sound like an aircraft
> >> getting ready to take off. Are they normally that loud or are they on the
> >> fast track to failure?
> >
> > They shouldn't be very loud. If they are, I'd worry. It may be
> > normal for that particular type of disk but I doubt it. If they
> > are very old, I'd consider making backups at least.
> >
> > -am © 2003
>
> That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for the confirmation.
>
> Coy

Yes, that does not sound too hopeful, but experience tells me that
drives can continue like that for a long time. We had one at work like
it for about a year and was only finally switched off when I moved
desk and decided the noise was too much for me. However the person
near it never complained before I don't know.

Modern SCSI hard drives have mean time between failures of 1,000,000
or more hours, which is 114 years. I only found out recently that this
does *not* mean that if you fill a load of computers with such drives,
on average the time for a drive to fail would be 114 years.

What it does mean is that if you fill a load of computers with such
disks, then at the end of the service life of the disk (typically 5
years) you replace them with new drives, and keep doing this (so you
would have put 22 disks in during the 114 years), then the mean time
for an unexpected failure will be 114 years. I suspect few realise
this - perhaps few care about it. I got that information from
Seagate's web site.

PS, it is more useful if you put a title of 'Is this disk going to
fail?' or something like that, rather than 'another question'. It
helps people decide whether they can usefully answer the question and
it help others who search on Google groups at a later date.


--
Dr. David Kirkby,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269
Internal telephone: ext 46408
e-mail davek@medphys.ucl.ac.uk