🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Forget wrote about his Megafile making noises..
 
There are two sources of such noises normally.. the first is a
"head crash" where the flying read/write heads make contact
with the spinning disk and gouge the surface of the disk.
The material scraped from the surface will cause secondary
crashes until the heads and surfaces are destroyed.  The noise
from a head crash will usually be a scraping and grinding sound.
 
You do NOT want this to happen..!               :)
 
The second source of noise is a "ground strap" which serves to bleed
off static electricity which would otherwise build up on the spinning
platters.  The place where this strap contacts the end of the axle
tends to wear, allowing the strap to vibrate and make noises.
 
This is not destructive, only annoying.
 
There are ways to dampen the vibrations of the ground strap, but they
require disassembly of the case, and possibly removing the pc board
on the bottom of the hard drive itself.  If you can get to it, a small
blob of silicone sealer on the *outside* of the strap will often cure
the noises.
 
(A third source of noise could be failing bearings in the cooling fan,
but it would be pretty obvious where that noise was coming from.)
 
In the case of a head crash, you'd know it very soon, as the drive would
become unreadable, and there would be many errors.
 
From the description of the symptoms, and especially because the noise
changes with the orientation of the drive, it sounds like the ground
strap to me...
 
BobR