My PowerMac’s HD seems to be making this odd noise rather suddenly. I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t present, at least not as loudly, before I booted it up from sleep just now.
I’m afraid I’m not sure how to describe it; it’s a little like grinding, but not really. It’s not harsh at all. It’s rather like a sharp, metallic hum that undulates occasionally, punctuated sometimes by what sounds like the HD spinning. It sounds a little like it’s a very tiny buzzsaw blade that’s running, but not cutting into anything. In other words, it doesn’t SOUND like an obvious problem; I’ve been hearing this sound made by my ancient Powerbook G3’s HD for a long while now, but I think this is the first time I’ve heard it on my desktop.
Anything serious, y’think? The fact that I hear it in both computers leads me to believe it’s either not too serious, or relatively common, but it really sucks not being able to describe it accurately. Hopefully someone can help. Thanks!
Do you have an IBM Deskstar hard drive in there, and does the noise sound like this? If so, you are probably experiencing the “Click of Death.” The hard disk will likely fail soon, so you should back up your data and get a new hard disk. Also inquire into a warranty replacement.
Even if you don’t have a Deskstar drive, you should still look into a new hard drive, as unusual hard disk noises are often a symptom of impending failure.
It sounds SOMEWHAT like that file, Cleophus, except not as loud, and without some of the clicking. Like I said, I don’t know if I’ve been hearing it for longer, but I certainly heard enough unusual volume to startle me when I first powered up. The drive is an IBM, but I have no idea what type.
Suggestions for how to proceed, especially with good brands?
Sounds like your hard drive’s bearings are starting to wear. It might work fine for years to come, it might fail next week. Best to replace it now and not worry about it. Besides, you’ll go nuts listening to that whining sound day after day.
Just buy yourself a new drive, install it, copy everything from the old drive to the new one, wipe the old drive (don’t want anyone peeking at your data, do you?), and discard it. If you want more specifics, we can help you there. As for brands, I may not be much help, because I’ve been using laptops for years, so my experience with recent makes of desktop hard drives is limited. But I haven’t heard bad things about any of the major manufacturers out there today, like Western Digital and Maxtor.
Getting a new hard drive would be a smart move. They are relatively cheap these days. With some keen shopping around, you should pay about $60-80 for a 120 gig 7200 rpm IDE drive. Aim for a unit price of fifty cents per gig. I own Western Digital, IBM and Maxtor drives and think they are all great. A model with an 8mb cache will give you slightly better performance. Seagate is considered the best but costs more.
When transferring your files from the old drive to the new, use Carbon Copy Cloner if you are running OSX–a must. Unless your G4 is faster than 667mHz you will be limited to a maximum usable hard drive space of about 128gigs, so you may want to avoid larger drives even though the prices are dropping weekly. There is, however, a workaround to the 128gig limit but you would have to purchase HD Speedtools. This utility allows you to format a drive at a larger size in OS9 and then OSX will magically recognize the larger than 128gig sized drive. But then you gotta factor in the cost of the utility application and all that.
I once won a bid to erase retired drives containing sensitive data so that they could not be read, even by recovery services. My bid of $25 per drive (some years back) was so much lower than the next that the purchasing agent questioned me to make sure my business understood the guarantee required, and the penalties for failure.
The other guys were proposing software to repeatedly write patterns of data calculated to obscure any possible data past detection. We just pounded them with a sledgehammer.
If you are going to discard a drive, there is no need to “wipe” the drive, just destroy it mechanically.
You don’t even need tools to destroy the new laptop drives and any others with glass platters. Just stomp on 'em, and they shatter into a bazillion needle-sharp shards. The cleaning crew here must have thought I was playing with glitter that day. :eek: