🚀 go-pugleaf

bruce@bruces.frontiertech.com writes:

>About three months ago I bought a Seagate ST3283A hard drive
>(that's the 240 MB, 12ms model).  When I installed it, it made an
>extremely high-pitched, ear-piercing whine that could be heard in the 
>next room.  I called tech support, they said "Bad bearings, send it back."
>I did, and got a new drive. The new one was much quieter, but still 
>made a very audible whirring sound (at least as loud as the power
>supply fan).  Since it was quieter, I thought "Well, maybe this model
>just makes more noise than my previous drive because it is bigger and 
>faster."  Then, wierd things started happening in Windows, like
>"Extremely Low on Memory" errors with no apps running and 8MB of real 
>RAM.  I began to suspect the drive was hiccupping and doing bad
>things to Windows' attempts to access the swapfile.  The problems 
>subsided when I turned off Windows' 32-bit access option.  Last night, 
>Windows locked up solid with no warnings or errors.  It took a hardware 
>reset to unlock it.  Then my machine wouldn't boot from hard disk or 
>floppy until I powered it down and up again.  The power-on self
>test kept reporting "HDD Failure."  Looks to me like another bad drive.

>So, my question is this:  Has anyone else on this group gotten the 
>ST3283A?  What were your expereneces? Is this drive loud by nature, or
>have I gotten two bad apples in a row?  I am interested in any experiences, 
>good and bad, so I know whether to keep exchanging this for the same
>model or cut my losses and get a different drives.

>Thanks in advance, 
>Bruce A Backman  (bruce@frontiertech.com)



Undoubtedly the problem with your disk is bad sectors. I had exatly the same
problems with ST3283N (Same drive but with SCSI interface). My advice is
to get a different drive !

The ST3283N drives I tried didn't make much noise.


--- Eigil