Anyone ever heard an HDD "beep" before?

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Nate7311

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I've got a user with a Dell M4400 Laptop with a WD Scorpio Black 250GB HDD that beeps. Upon closer inspection, It looks like the bearings are creating a squeal at the right pitch and duration that sounds like a beep.

Bizarre. I'll try and post a vid of it later.
 
Yes I've heard hd's make both chirps and beeps. Thought it was my motherboard forever until I switched the system and kept the drive, the only thing that was moved over. I had never heard a hd beep before and I've been doing this for a long time.
 
Hard drive use magnetics very similar to a speakers voice coil, so in certain situations the actuation of the arm will make very audible noises. If you do a seek test on a drive they typically start at a high pitch and run to a low one as the head moves.
 
I have seen a hard drive make beeping noises after the laptop it was in fell out of a helicopter.
 
I've also heard a hard drive beep before. I was utterly baffled by the beeps and refused to believe it was coming from the drive itself until I swapped to another system, and sure enough, the noise still came from the drive. It's definitely very rare, but it can happen.
 
Right here, dude. The video says it's an 80GB unit but, I've experienced this with several flavors of WD scorpio drives. Don't let them tell it's "normal" either. Every damned one of the units making these noises bit the dust hard shortly after it began.
 
The old Seagate 2.5" I ripped out of my laptop for an SSD used to chirp and beep, especially when shutting the system down (as the heads were parking).
 
I workd on one where the owner had gotten pissed off and threw the laptop it was in across the room causing the heads to slap the platters. It would "beep" when the heads passed over the damaged section.
 
ckryan said:
The old Seagate 2.5" I ripped out of my laptop
Click to expand...

I've also heard something that I would describe as a beep occasionally coming from a 2.5" Seagate drive I purchased about 3 or 4 years ago. It died after about 1.5 years of use, and I've never heard a noise like that from any other hard drive I've ever used. I bought the drive new for use in a desktop system I was building, and unless it was damaged in shipping, it was never dropped, overheated, or otherwise abused.

Edit: I should also note that for almost the entire life of the drive, I had problems with it, like my system would freeze and then the drive would start clicking immediately afterward, etc. I'm not sure if that was related to the beeping though.
 
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