Musical Maxtor

[ScottW]

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]

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]

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]]

Strange.

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

[ScottW]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[dunbar]

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.

[DanU]

That doesn't sound anything like your typical low-pitched head-positioning sounds. I doubt the voice coil positioner is capable of vibrating that quickly to produce those high pitched tones. Given a seek time a few milliseconds, the most they could hope to produce would be a few hundred Hz. Those tones sounded like a couple KHz.

Also, there's a definite pure, harmonious quality to it. To my poorly trained ear, it sounds like a pure sine wave. Musically, it sounds like a perfect fifth followed by a major third interval. Head movements and their associated vibrations sound more like noise due to all the random interactions. I still think it sounds like a small speaker inside, probably a little piezo tweeter.

BTW, there is air in the hard drive. In fact, that air is critical to a HDD head's ability to glide just microns above the platter. Also critical is the spinning of the drive. The spinning helps form the air cushion. Without the platters in motion, the head "crashes" and gets stuck on the platter... which precludes the positioner from moving at all. Scott said that the hard drive doesn't even spin up.

I agree that the freezer trick should only be used as a last resort. But bearing life isn't a big issue since the hard drive is most likely going to be either discarded or returned for replacement after recoving the data. Actually the last resort would be to send it to a data recovery shop, which charge a hefty amount for their services.

BTW, I forgot to add that it's a good idea to put the HDD in a bag, suck out as much air as you can, then stick it in the freezer/fridge. This will keep too much moisture from condensing on the HDD.

[ScottW]

Well here's the latest.. I couldn't get the drive to spin up and I wasn't going to risk Maxtor refurbing the drive and leaving my data on it over $100, so I opened the drive up myself in search of the source of the beeps.

There is a small rectangular plastic box with clear sides, that contains hundreds of what appear to be tiny metal beads, with a paper membrane on the top of the box. The sound appeared to be coming from that box. The box seems to be some kind of an air filter, since the box is connected to the underside of the drive through a tube.

The box itself:


The airhole on the controller side of the drive:


The position of the box in the drive enclosure:


I removed the box from the drive and got it to spin up and all seems fine, though now I don't trust the drive at all. I put the box back in place (it's just held down by some glue/sticky junk) and now it still spins up fine. I can't RMA the drive now that I opened it up but I guess I'll use it as a scratch/temp disk .

[DanU]

You could turn it into a hard drive window mod project. Maybe put some blue LEDs in there that blink with the music. That would be waaay cool!

[dunbar]

Quote:

Originally posted by DanU
That doesn't sound anything like your typical low-pitched head-positioning sounds. I doubt the voice coil positioner is capable of vibrating that quickly to produce those high pitched tones. Given a seek time a few milliseconds, the most they could hope to produce would be a few hundred Hz. Those tones sounded like a couple KHz.

I worked for Unitrode Integrated Circuits back in the late 1990s. Unitrode was working on a chip for a very large hard disk outfit at the time I was there. The head positioning system is not electronically limited to milliseconds. The electronics are capable of delivering electrical impulses which are shorter than a few tens of microseconds in duration. The electrical pulses generate magnetic fields of the same duration in order to interact with the head positioning systems static magnetic structure. Even if the heads do not move, the mechanical structure is still being whacked with those electrically generated, magnetic pulses which are tens of microseconds in duration. The result is like striking a tubular bell. With a head stuck to a platter, you have a beam which can flex and resonate (I think the resonances are higher in frequency than the audible range), that will transmit those magnetic pulses to the platters. Those head positioners are not slowed because of the electronics, they are slowed because of the mass of the arm and because of air frictions; because of those problems, the settling time to reach the target position becomes a problem of how quickly can you mechanically dampen a swinging pendulum.

Imagine: when you swing a baseball bat as hard as possible, you cannot stop the tip of the bat when it is pointing exactly at the pitcher (on the first attempt).... you over shoot the mark; then you pull back towards the pitcher, and maybe overshoot that realignment attempt as well. That is what causes milliseconds of seek times, not the drive circuitry. That and the air friction of trying to move the heads laterally against the revolving air immediately above the platters.

Quote:

Also, there's a definite pure, harmonious quality to it. To my poorly trained ear, it sounds like a pure sine wave. Musically, it sounds like a perfect fifth followed by a major third interval. Head movements and their associated vibrations sound more like noise due to all the random interactions. I still think it sounds like a small speaker inside, probably a little piezo tweeter.

[DanU]

Lots of good info, dunbar. I'll have to try one of those "musical hard drive" programs and see what it sounds like. I tried a similar program that used the floppy drive once... and it sounded like an ogre trying to whistle.

Quote:

Originally posted by dunbar
I can't fathom why someone would put a sound transducer into a sealed hard disk box, especially when the device needs electrical connection to the PC board which is outside the sealed cahmber. In fact, why not put the transducer onto the PC board, which is where the transducers are already designed to be placed, and would also thus be better heard?

That's what I'm now wondering. Why put it INSIDE? And what's the purpose of putting it in the hard drive's air filter??

[samwichse]

That little paper covered box looks exactly like a dessicant box (moisture trap).

The noise just seems freaky. Like a cellphone ring tone or something. But it definately doesn't sound like it's coming from a vibrating arm or something, the tone is way to pure for that.

[dunbar]

Purity of tone has little to do with mechanical structures being stuck. Open a dead disk drive, tip it 45 degrees, and drop a tiny screw onto the edge of the disk platter.... a beautiful bell-like tone. Even if the heads are stuck to the platters, in which case the ring is dampened to a shorter duration.
samwichse, I think you are exactly correct, dessicant. when scottw removed the box, either he jiggled the platters and that unstuck the heads, or maybe the dessicant box had crept sideways and contacted the platters directly. Eitherway, seems strange to see dessicants inside the chamber. Not impossible, but certainly odd.

[babalu20]

I got the EXACT same melodic noise today off my Maxtor 120 gig 8 mb fluid bearing drive when it 'disappeared' from my system today. I run XP Pro, have a Gigabyte 7vrxp and used the drive as a slave for an ftp. The bios will not detect it. The drive is two weeks old.

It DEFINITELY is coming from the drive and is not a post code. Never heard anything like it from a pc. It sounds more like a ringer from a childs play cellphone.

[ScottW]

It's junk - don't open it up, just call them and get it replaced. Seems to be a common defect whatever it is, I've heard that it has happened to others.. If they fail, they seem to fail in the first few weeks.

[unskilled]

Finally, I've found people who have the same problem. I'm on my temp computer because I'm waiting on an RMA processor. Anyway the DiamondMax9 120GB Maxtor is laying outside of the tower. By accident, a stack of CDs fell on it as I was watching an avi sub from that drive. I quickly turn off the computer and make sure everything is correctly working. Then I power up again and I hear that exact same noise that you recorded. Moreover, I notice that the drive is not even spinning.

The drive is still under warranty but I have some very valuable fansubs on it that took me a while to collect, is there way a I could recover them and THEN send it in to Maxtor?