Hard drive whining loudly SOLVED- Use drive with caution!

[Canadianpride]

Hi, I just picked up an older pc for cheap. It's a 766 p3 with 396 mgs of ram. It has a 10 gig hardrive. I partitioned the drive with a swap partition and an ext2 file system on which I installed puppy 2.02 but the drive is increadably loud. It has been since I booted it up. I'm wondering if theres a problem with the drive or if its just loud and if theres a way I could quiet it down.
Thanks Matthew.

[headfound]

An excessively noisy hard drive can mean its wearing or worn out. Some drives can be noisier than others but i'd be careful with important work. Anything you put around it to dampen the sound may cause it to overheat

[fluxit]

I'd be willing to bet that it's a Seagate drive. While what headfound posted is true, IME the drives that are noisiest from the start tend to be cheaper models by Seagate. You may be able to reduce the transmission of the motor noise through your computer's case by placing thin rubber washers or strips(cut from bicycle tube or similar) between the sides(or bottom if bottom mounted) of the drive and the drive bay. This will increase the temperature the drive runs at however, and most likely shorten its life if extra cooling is not added.

[Canadianpride]

opps sorry forgot to say it's a Maxtor drive. Hmm doesn't sound to promising

[Sage]

Ominous! Maxtor are generally only moderately noisy. However, some bearings become noisy AND continue for years, whilst other become noisy as a portent of disaster. Such are the vagueries of mass production.
You certainly cannot rely on this drive. Nor, for that matter, any other drive of any age. All rotating/reciprocating machinery wears, by definition. Sooner or later all drives will fail. Some manufacturers publish their bell-curves, most keep them top secret. Be guided by two principles: most mass-produced items with initial defects will fail within ~6hrs. Statistically, most units will achieve the peak on the MTBF curve, or be eligible for warranty replacement. Furthermore, lifetime is strongly influenced by ON-OFF cycles. As an example, a drive with an MTBF rating of 80K hours (~nine years) could be expected to last ~3yrs if switched on and off once a day. However, if it were only used for eight hours a day, then it might last nine years.
But there is a sting in the tail for all 'doze users. Each reboot probably counts as an ON-OFF cycle. So if you use an OS which requires several reboots to install/reinstall/restore, expect to be a regular purchaser of drives. On the other hand, Linux users can often squeeze extended lifetimes out of old drives well beyond the peak in the skewed bell-curve, especially as dropping back to the command line doesn't count in the longevity stakes. Using Linux saves landfill - 'doze users will continue to be penalised where it hurts most.

[Runemaster]

Me personally I think you're fine, in my room I've got a junkyard of old computer crap. and many of the drives that have been given to me are very old and noisy, I'm talkin like they sound like radiation detectors, those clicks from the read/write arm changeing directions will drive anyone crazy but I haven't had one fail just yet, and these I'm talking about are like half a gig and well over life expectancy.

______________
Knowledge comes from experience.....Strength comes from battleaxes.

[rarsa]

Rule of thumb.

Don't trust important information to a HDD younger than 3 months or older than 5 years (some people may even say 3 years).

[Canadianpride]

Alright Thanks for the advice. There's nothing on the drive I can't replace except for some text files I need for school. I'll just back those up regularly on my thumb drive.
Thanks a bunch!
Matthew!

[Flash]

Or you could invest in a DVD burner and run Puppy from a multisession DVD.