hard drive noises -- western digital wd800ve

[Tulio Guimarães da Silva]

Hi gentlemen,
    I don´t know if it´s related, but (I went to investigation) there´s 
a known issue with WD HDs from 40 to 200GB prior to 2003/03/25 (March 
25, 2003 - dates are always confusing :) ); even though it´s associated 
to RAID-controllers, it seems indeed that there is some kind of timeout 
generated by the acoustic reduction features of the drives.
  Here´s the link to the explanation:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=913

  In short, there seems to be a bit to be disabled at run-time, *but* 
the utility is only available to Windows systems. ¬¬ It can be 
downloaded here:
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=4&swid=11

  Maybe it´s an issue that could be trated by the ata(4) driver or 
sysctl (if not already), but... *maybe*; that´s really not for me to 
tell. :P
  Anyway, I guess people with this issue should contact WD or a 
reseller. Since it´s a somewhat limited issue, *and* it´s known to the 
manufacturer, I think they wouldn´t oppose to replace the affected drive(s).
  Cheers,

Tulio G. da Silva

Dan Ponte wrote:

>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
>  
>