re: An answer from Seagate!
Thursday, May 13, 2004 at 7:27 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Fred
(1 messages posted)
Yes, but Seagate's reply is regarding the resync that takes place every few minutes.
Drives don't have stepping motors anymore. They use a magnetic field to position
the head over the track.
The head alignment changes as the drive's temperature changes, and so every few minutes,
the drive's internal firmware does a bunch of seeks to many tracks on the drive,
and then it adjusts its internal tables that indicate how much voltage to apply to
get to specific tracks. This sync process is performed every time a drive starts
up, you'll hear it once for every drive in your system when you power up. These seeks
sound kind of like a "whirring" noise.
But the resyncing process does not turn on the access light, and won't show up on
any software monitor. It's a firmware process. Some drives allow it to be turned
off, but by turning it off, the drive's tables will often be wrong, so the firmware
will have to do at least two seeks to satisfy a transfer request.
As far as wear on the drive, the only moving parts that are supposed to be making
a physical contact inside the drive is the bearing on the arm. I've never heard of
one of them wearing out. Even on twenty year old drives. The track's home address
info goes first. Or a head crashes.
On Saturday, April 10, 2004 at 3:16 pm, Marfan wrote:
>Here is the answer I recieved from Seagate:
>
> The latest generation of our high-capacity drives have been programmed to perform
>regular off-line scans to test the drive's reliability and detect any possible malfunctions
>while the drive is still relatively new. These
> tests occur during times of system idle and are programmed to end after a certain
>number of power-on hours.
>
> Please remember that this is a very large drive spinning at 7200rpm. This is much
>faster than the common 5400rpm. In addition, the capacity
> increases the possibility for vibration and seek noise because of the amount of
>data being read so quickly. Higher performance always brings about more noise/vibration.
> Our drive is still the most silent for its
> size and performance.
>
> If you are disturbed by the amount of noise produced, you can run our SeaTools
Desktop
>Edition to check the physical integrity of the drive:
> http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
> If you have any other questions, please contact us.
> Regards,
> Seagate Technical Support
>
- Written in response to:
- An answer from Seagate! (Marfan: Saturday, April 10, 2004 at 3:16 pm)
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