Maxtor 6Y080PO - weird "crunching" noises every now and again?

[shandyboy]

Hiya,

I've noticed that my 80Gb drive has occasionally started making "crunching" noises from the heads every now and again.

It usually does it when I exit a big game such as UT2004 and it's having to load in a lot of data to get me back to my desktop.

The strange thing is, I've ran PowerMax on the drive, and it passed every single test with no problem.

I have also been running HDDoctor which reads the SMART info from the drive and alerts you to problems as they happen, and when the drive made it's latest "crunching" noise, a warning immediately appeared from HDDoctor saying that SMART register "D1" (unknown register) had hit a threshhold, and it raised a TEC (Threshold Exceeded Condition) straight away (basically saying the drive was dead/dying).

BUT as I say, PowerMax says everything is hunky dory!

When the crunch happens, the computer freezes for the half second or so while it does it, but is fine afterwards.

I'm running it at full speed (ATA133), and have tried enabling and disabling quiet mode using AMSET.

I also tried raising a question with Maxtor, but got a crappy auto-response back, and now I can't find the support login page to re-submit it!! Does anyone know where you go straight to actually contact a real person by email? I'm in the UK if that matters.

Many thanks for any help/ideas/pointers.

Cheers

Neil

[jmichna]

Neil,
My suggestion would be to backup any necessary data and contact Maxtor regarding an RMA before you get total failure (usually the HD manufacturer web site has an automated RMA procedure... at least Western Digital did with my last RMA request). Good luck.
jmichna

[jmichna]

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/index.htm

[shandyboy]

Cheers Jmichna...

I'm still waiting for Maxtor to reply to my question regarding the clunking....

And I've also emailed PC World (stupid I know buying a drive from them!) - hope their returns policy is ok.

One thing that concerns me... I have a lot of data that I'd like to transfer to any replacement drive - think they'll let me "borrow" the old drive to swap everything across?

The clunking is more like a "cliiiiick-click" and it freezes the computer whilst it's doing it (good job it only happens whilst games are loading or exiting :-)

Cheers

Neil

[jmichna]

Neil,
Storage had gotten so inexpensive, I've added second HDs to all three of our PCs at home just for B/U purposes... in the States you can get an 80gb drive for less than a dollar a gb, and we use Norton's "Ghost" as the back-up client.
jmichna

PS: Welcome to TechIMO!

[mar122999]

If you ran the diagnostic test with PowerMax, then the drive should be OK for now. Maxtor certifies that the drive should be fine if you run more than one scan using the PowerMax diagnostic utlitiy. Even though it is possibly for it to be wrong, I have found it to be right time and time again. Backup data is a must anyway. Clunking is not normal though. Something inside geared towards hardware may be malfunctioning and about to crash. RMA is simple to get if you drive fails the PowerMax diagnostic utility. When it does, an error code will be generated and RMA is simple.

[shandyboy]

Cheers all...

I got a reply back from Maxtor a couple of days ago saying "the noises indicate a severe fault - please replace the unit" and saying if I couldn't get it swapped in-store I had to RMA it...

I got a mate (who uses linux) to make a backup image of my old data, and then he scribbled over the HD (data-wise, not literally!) to make sure no data remained.

I took it down to PC world, and the tech guy said "oh we'll have to test it as it's 4 months old" and I though "oh ****, he's going to check for errors and there aren't any (yet)"...

The tech plugged it into a pc, AND TRIED TO BOOT FROM IT :-D

No partition info as my mate had overwritten it with junk...! The tech came back and said "ooh it is broken isn't it..."

They didn't have any similar sized drives so I had to take a much bigger one and paid the difference (but prices have come down so I was happy)...

What's even funnier is that Maxtor sent me a follow up email saying as it was only a S.M.A.R.T warning and not an error, and that the drive hadn't given any errors yet, that my drive was probably OK and they would only replacing it as a customer courtesy....!!!!

Good job that arrived too late!

Cheers all!

Neil

watch the language - Fingers

whoops ;-) Sorry

[ArcticFox]

A "crunching" noise huh? I also have a 7200rpm 80GB Maxtor, and sometimes it possibly makes a sound like what you are describing, though it's hard to tell if it's just the heads flicking back and forth extremely fast. This thing has been dropped 5 feet onto rock hard ground and has worked great since day 1, so I'd buy another one if the Raptors hadn't caught my eye.

I'll check it out with that testing thing though, I hadn't looked into it before. The problem is that it's an OEM unit, no warranty.

[shandyboy]

Hiya ArcticFox,

It's much more than a normal "disk heads" noise... It's like a noise that doesn't sound right coming from a hard drive :-)

It was like a "cliiiiiiick-click" and froze the computer whilst it was happening (although it only lasted a fraction of a second or so, and only while it was performing disk-intensive operations).

Even though your drive is oem, it should have some sort of warranty surely? You can check the status of your warranty by typing in your serial number on the maxtor site.

You can find the serial number from the drive itself or from S.M.A.R.T. software.

The utility I used which is fantastic and greatly helped in diagnosing that I did actually have a problem, was HDD Health from panterasoft:

http://panterasoft.com/download/hhealth.exe

It's freeware too, very small, and very lightweight - an excellent tool.

A colleague who was having occasional dvd burn failures installed it after I recommended it to him, and the first thing it did was bring up a warning box saying his drives were critically overheating at 61c!!!

He immediately added a bit more cooling! That utility is worth it's weight in gold

Cheers

Neil
http://www.chemicalbrothers.yorks.com/webcam/

[ArcticFox]

Originally posted by shandyboy

A colleague who was having occasional dvd burn failures installed it after I recommended it to him, and the first thing it did was bring up a warning box saying his drives were critically overheating at 61c!!!

Don't forget that MotherboardMonitor can do that. I have it set so Sensor 1 is CPU, 2 is chipset, and 3 is my HD. Sadly, my drive runs hotter than my CPU...