Just to go back to the original problem, I assumed it was an HD failing
because one of them made that noise when the heads go from one end to
another while booting. Two identical same age SATA drives. But it's still
working ok.

Sometimes when booting it appears to constantly poll the CD drives and
makes that noise - sometimes not. But always boots normally.

--
*Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
Just to go back to the original problem, I assumed it was an HD failing
because one of them made that noise when the heads go from one end to
another while booting. Two identical same age SATA drives. But it's still
working ok.

Sometimes when booting it appears to constantly poll the CD drives and
makes that noise - sometimes not. But always boots normally.

If the noise is from the drive then you do need to replace it ASAP.
It may continue to work for years but it probably wont.

Just make a backup to five or six distributed VTLs made by different
manufacturers and run by different people in different parts of the world
and you will probably be OK. 8-)

Oh BTW, copy it to local storage too as it can be a real pain restoring the
stuff over ADSL or a modem.

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:52:50 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Just to go back to the original problem, I assumed it was an HD failing
because one of them made that noise when the heads go from one end to
another while booting. Two identical same age SATA drives. But it's
still working ok.

Some drives go through a periodic thermal recalibration cycle, and can
make quite alarming noises as they bounce the heads around - it's
possible that's all you were hearing.

Querying the drive via SMART is perhaps the best thing you can do - the
logs should show if the drive has encountered an error or not.

cheers

Jules

"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:52:50 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Just to go back to the original problem, I assumed it was an HD failing
because one of them made that noise when the heads go from one end to
another while booting. Two identical same age SATA drives. But it's
still working ok.

Some drives go through a periodic thermal recalibration cycle, and can
make quite alarming noises as they bounce the heads around - it's
possible that's all you were hearing.

Drives doing recalibration don't usually make extra noise.
Modern ones don't do it the same way.
It used to produce delays.. hence the AV drives that were sold (at a
premium) that didn't do the recalibration all in one go.


Querying the drive via SMART is perhaps the best thing you can do - the
logs should show if the drive has encountered an error or not.

It may not actually get read errors, but it probably gets seek errors.