Noisey Motherboard, Worringly Noisey Hard Drive..

[blizeH]

Hi there, I've got a faulty Seagate Hard Drive, it's an 80GB, 7200RPM and has actually been faulty since I had it, I just didn't realise. It was very slow at file transfers but I just assumed it was the standard speed to transfer files between drives (my main one with the windows partition, and the secondary hard drive for storage)

But anyway, I've fitted a new hard drive today, another Seagate Barracuda 160GB this time, again an IDE one. It's all working fine, I've put all of my 70GB of data on there, it's quick and so far all seems in order, as far as actual functionality is concerned, however, it's making a very wierd scrunching kind of sound whilst in use. It's not that loud but it's still worrying, especially after having the previous drive being faulty from the offset. Is there anyway to check if it is indeed faulty short of sending it back? I don't really want to do this as I'd lose all of my data, that'd be a bit of a nightmare in all honesty.

But anyways, that's not my only problem. My computer in general makes a fairly hideous screeching sound, only emphasised by my recent purchase of an Antec Sonata silent case, it's intermitent which only furthers the irritation, if it was consistent it wouldn't be so bad, but becuase it's so random it makes me notice it a lot more, quite oftne I'll just be sitting here waiting for it to screech again. I'm not sure of the best way to describe it, screeching is the only word that comes close, but, I'd loosely say it sounds like electricity, if that's even possible.

I've almost eliminated it to the toroidal inductor in the respect that whenever I push on them with a pencil the noise stops. I tried placing first of all some glue onto them incase it was a wierd vibration, and also some nail varnish, neither of which made any difference what so ever. The motherboard is an Asus A7N8X-X by the way.

So yeah, my PC, with all of it's silent fans, noise proof case and nicely mounted drives is actually proving to be quite the contrary. The crunching noise of the hard drive isn't that irritating, but it is very concerning that the hard drive might fail. The screeching noise is the exact opposite, I'm not concerned at all that it'll fail becuase it's been like it for around two years now, since I originally built the computer, but the noise is extremely irritating. Any help or advice would be very much appreciated, thank you!

[goldeagle2005]

For your hard drive worries, a little noise from the seagate hdd is normal. As long as its not a screeching sound, you should be okay.

You mentioned a screeching sound from the cabinet in general. THAT is worrisome. Is it emanating from the hard drive? The CD Drive? Try disconnecting all components and then reconnect them one by one to see which component is at fault

[blizeH]

Thanks for the responce! I'll ignore the hard drive then, like I said the hard drive noise isn't too irritating, just a little worrying, but if it's normal then no worries at all :)

The screeching noise is almost definately coming from somewhere on the motherboard, but I'm not quite sure where, I have tried disconnecting drives etc and it still persists ;(

[chrisbliss18]

I'm a big fan of Seagate drives since they have great warrenties, don't give me many issues, and are relatively quiet. If you are concerned about the health of your drives, first turn on S.M.A.R.T. for your drives in your BIOS and then run Seagate's SeaTools to check your drives for errors.

If your "faulty" 80GB drive is indeed faulty, it's not too old, and you haven't done anything to it to void the warrenty, it should be able to be RMA'd for a replacement.

[>shadow<]

please check that your motherboard is screwed in tightly and properly as it could be vibrating and scrreching

[blizeH]

Many thanks for the link, just ran it and :

Run: 26/09/2005 01:03:52

NVIDIA nForce2 ATA Controller (v2.6) : ST3160023A
Model: ST3160023A
Serial Number: 4JS0SV90
Capacity: 160.04 GB
Test result: Self-test routine completed without error.

So it's all good :) The noise is a little annoying I'll admit, but it's no real problem, I was just worried it was going to fail on me! The 80GB one is almost two years old now, so it's definately out of warranty ;(

The motherboard... :evil: I have taken it out once or twice and it hasn't stopped the noise, although I did have many problems with it shorting out so it wouldn't suprise me if it wasn't actually fitted properly... hmmm...!

Thanks again,
blizeH

[>shadow<]

hmm...it could be the fan/ heatsink----try sticking your ear up to the fan and motherboard but be sure that you dont chop your ear off :)

[>shadow<]

oh sorry...i just realised you said that the toroidal inductor was noisy

try slightly pushing the toroidal inductor away from any close objects (eg-capacitors)

[chrisbliss18]

The 80GB one is almost two years old now, so it's definately out of warranty ;(

Don't be so sure about that. Most Seagate drives carry 5 year warrenties. The nice thing is that when you RMA the drive, they send you a replacement one and you keep the original warrenty.

I bought a drive last year that got the "click of death" problem. I'm RMAing it currently and will receive a replacement of the same kind with a warrenty that goes to 2009.

[blizeH]

Thanks again for the responces guys, the noisey hard drive is now functioning perfectly silent, the slightly faulty hard drive (works fine but slowly) is now happily sat in a friends computer purely as a bit of additional storage. The motherboard noises are still there but I think I can handle that, thanks again for all of the responces :)