Spinpoint F3 weird noise?

[kandon]

My Spinpoint F3 recently has started to make this weird noise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ikPpZNtOdw


I bought it about 2-3 weeks ago and it has started making that noise ever since I opened up my case and managed my cables a bit (I didn't know my case had cable management until 2 days ago). It's really annoying and kind of audible over my fans. Should this be happening? Should I RMA it?

 

[rolli59]

If that is the drive making the noise I would RMA!

 

[kajabla]

If you're sure it's the drive, definitely RMA. Make sure it's the culprit by taking it out of the case, away from the other components.

 

[kandon]

Yeah I'm positive it's the drive. Whenever I like click a webpage or something it starts making that noise as if it's reading/writing something. And it only started happening recently! God dang it, now I have to reinstall everything..

 

[kajabla]

Back up! Back up! BACK UP! If the drive's working, you can just clone it to another drive. Here's your course of action, assuming you don't already have a backup drive.
1.Buy a backup drive of the same or greater capacity as your current drive.
2.Back up onto the new drive.
3.RMA the current drive.
4.Restore to the RMAed drive from the backup.
This way you'll end up with a working system drive and a backup to boot (absolutely essential).

 

[kandon]

I just ran the Seatools diagnostic thing for it (Samsung HD's are now compatible with Seatools) and every test I threw at it, it passed. People told me that this noise is normal (and I remember hearing it sometimes with my old Seagate hard drive) but it just started happening all of a sudden and it's sort of annoying. Are you guys SURE it is faulty?

 

[rolli59]

I have 3 HDD drive (16 total in the home computers) if they would be louder than my fans I would consider them faulty, I can not hear any of them except an 10+ year old 40GB Maxtor drive in my win 98 system, todays drives are quiet compared to older ones.

 

[popatim]

I beleive there is a firmwarepatch to help reduce the odd noises the F3 makes.
In google I found that it was a utility to enable automatic accoustic management (AAM) but it appears Seagate has deleted it from the download section. Bad Seagate, Bad!

 

[Formata]

I have the Spinpoint F3 and it's a little loud while operating/spinning... but doesn't sound like your video does. As Kajabla suggests, try moving it out of the drive bay while still connected or just try remounting in the drive bay?? Otherwise send it back.