hard drive noises -- western digital wd800ve

[Dan Ponte]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 09:01:52PM -0400, Michael Roberts <tpen0010 at hotmail.com> was witnessed plotting the following conspiracy:
> hi,
> 
> thanks for all your responses.  i've heard similar things, and am getting a 
> replacement drive sent out from WD.  however, a few interesting things:
> 
> 1) the frequency of the tic/toc noises (really they sound like "toc - tic" 
> ..) decreases when i disable acpi.  i should have done this before, of 
> course....  I haven't tried switching to apm.  but w/o acpi, performance is 
> pretty good, and i don't get the delays with tab-completion.
> 
> 2) i've run every hardware tester i could get my hands on, and none of them 
> find any bad sectors/block/anything.  the drive always checks out.
> 
> this is all making me think that i've just got my system configured wrong.  
> like maybe i need some special device in my kernel for this particular 
> drive?  or maybe i need to mess with acpi settings to get things 
> streamlined?
> 
> any suggestions along these lines? or should i just trash the thing...
> 
> thx again.
> 
Well, this drive is probably 4 or 5 years old by now, and I'm pretty
sure it's been clicking along since I got it. ACPI would make sense;
maybe the BIOS or something is trying to turn off the drive motor, but
the OS needs to use it, so it turns back on. This is rather farfetched,
though, as it happens usually during load. I have ACPI enabled, but
dmesg tells me that my BIOS is blacklisted, so I doubt it's really
enabled.
-Dan
-- 
Dan Ponte
http://www.theamigan.net/
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