Musical Maxtor

**ScottW** · November 30th, 2002, 05:12 PM

Last week I bought two 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9's and set them up in RAID 1 on an Abit KD7-RAID board. For the first 5 days or so, both drives ran fine.

On day 5, I came home and found that one of the drives in the array had failed, so I powered down, and rebooted. I then heard a series of beeps coming from the system - they didn't sound at all like normal BIOS error beeps and they seemed to be coming from the failed drive itself. I removed the drive, connected it to the power supply, and confirmed that yep, the beeps were coming from the Maxtor drive itself.

I checked maxtor's site - they claim that the drive does not contain any sort of speaker/audio output device. I recorded the beeps (http://www.techimo.com/maxtorbeeps.mp3). The drive won't even spin up at powerup. Any ideas here or did I get some sort of wicked prototype

. I bought both drives from googlegear so they aren't eval/sample models.

Scott Tiger · November 30th, 2002, 05:15 PM

That's weird...

I sure wish they'd beep or something before they failed though.

I've had two go south on me in the last month.

Hope it works out for you.

Brainchild · November 30th, 2002, 05:32 PM

I never heard anything like that.Too bad it'll void the warranty to pull it apart. It would be cool to see what was making the beeps

Skywalker[TSG] · November 30th, 2002, 05:37 PM

Strange.

Take it apart ! we want pics !
have you emailed maxtor about it ?

**ScottW** · November 30th, 2002, 05:59 PM

Yeah I emailed them for an RMA today, though I'd really rather not send it back to them since it has all of my data on it.

At first I thought someone had screwed with my system - I've never heard of a hard drive with built-in audible error beeps, strange indeed.

DanU · December 3rd, 2002, 02:51 PM

That definitely sounds like some kind of speaker. Hmm... I wonder if Maxtor let an engineering sample slip out....

Have you tried doing the refridgerator trick? Stick it in the fridge for about an hour, then put it back in the computer. Hopefully the cold spell will bring it back from the dead long enough for you to pull your data off of it and then format the drive so one one else can see your data.

SickPup404 · December 3rd, 2002, 03:30 PM

I wonder.... I seem to remember something from the old 5¼" floppy days that was a program that played "Daisy" on the stepper motor.... I wonder if some "733t hax0r" has figured out a way to do somthing similar in a HD??? (VERY far-fetched, I know, but an idea anyway!

)

SickPup404 · December 3rd, 2002, 03:35 PM

Also, see: (I searched Maxtor's site for "beeping" and this was the only hit...)
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...hp?p_faqid=481

SPEEDO · December 4th, 2002, 09:38 AM

Kinda sounds like your the first to get in touch with extraterrestrials through your computer...............

dunbar · December 4th, 2002, 09:50 AM

Mechanicals can do this. A sound transducer needs to vibrate air. The head positioner has a periodic motion, aka vibrations. The head positioner can vibrate the frame of the drive, a flat cover on the drive, the side panels of the mounting cage, etc., which displaces air in a periodic fashion. Hence, the head positioning system is humming along, being told to look for something first here then there then back again. You ear hears a nice beep. High school physics at work.

The refrigerator trick is valid but only as a last resort because the cold temps can reduce bearing life drastically due to contraction. The duration of frozen-ness can be extended with technical freeze sprays (Contact East, for one, carries them). Using the freeze spray, keep blasting the drive until you get the data, but beware that when the drive warms to room temp (this also happens when you run out of freeze spray), it may be covered with frost which melts and...... water water everywhere.

HTH.