Hard Drive Noise

[Billy Crook]

Good ole' reliable S.M.A.R.T., eh?  While the noise is happening, use
a cutip to stop each fan by pressing on it in the center (not the
blades) until the fan stops.  When it stops, an the noise doesn't
you've ruled out that fan.  Don't forget video cards.  It the noise is
mostly high pitch, higher than human voice, then it's probably a hard
drive.  Which one?

Save all your work, and close as many programs as you can.  This is
not to prevent data loss, but to reduce disk usage which can interfere
with this test.

As root, or via sudo, issue: "/sbin/hdparm -C /dev/<drive>" for each
drive on your system (hda, hdb, sda, sdb).  Note this is for the drive
not the partitions.  This will show you the power state of each drive,
which should come back looking like:

[bcrook at Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  active/idle

This means that sdc, in my case, is spinning.  You can stop the drive
from spinning by putting it in standby or sleep mode.  To do this,
issue: "sudo /sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdX; sudo /sbin/hdparm -Y /dev/sdX".
 hdparm's -y and -Y switches put a block device in standby or sleep
mode.  Not all devices or drive controllers will support both.  On my
computer, -Y does nothing.  But -y noticeably spins the disk down.

[bcrook at Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 issuing standby command
[bcrook at Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  standby

If you spin down /dev/sdc and the noise stops, then you've found the
problem.  Make sure your backups stay current, and start budgeting for
your replacement.  For those of you that want to save the life of your
drives, or save electricity you might even schedule (via crontab) all
of your hard drives to go to standby an hour after you go to work.
This might raise the question of how you get them spinning again.
Don't worry about that, the first time you go to access the disk after
sleeping or suspending it, linux will wake it right up for you, and
you'll only have to wait a couple seconds.  Hope this helps find the
culprit of that noise.  You might also look in to running the
smartutils short, long, and conveyance tests if you haven't already.
Badblocks in readonly mode, and "e2fsck -f" (after unmounting the fs
of course) is also not a bad idea if you want to give the disk a good
checkup.


On Nov 19, 2007 10:43 PM, Philip Dorr <tagno25 at gmail.com> wrote:
> also make sure all  the drives a properly screwed down
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 19, 2007 10:42 PM, James R. Sissel <JimSissel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > 10 words: Unplug them one at a time until the noise stops.
> >
> >
> > At 10:34 PM 11/19/2007 -0600, you wrote:
> > >one word: stethoscope.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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