My 67 Meg is getting very noisy!

[dave munroe]

> My 67 Meg is beginning to whine at an moderately irritating level.  The
> whine sounds sinusoidal...

I am familiar with two cases where this turned out not to be a problem and
one case (my 3B1) where the disk spindle locked up, rendering the drive
useless.

One case (not on a Unix PC) had to do with vibration from the drive: it was
making the case resonate.  By pressing lightly on the front cover, the noise
would go away.  The other case, my 7300, seems temperature related.  It
exhibits the same sinusoidal whine you describe.  Often it sounds like a
distant power-mower.  It has been doing this off and on for over six months,
and temperature is the only explanation I can come up with.  But perhaps the
drive *is* going bad and I'm fooling myself.

This would be a good time to make backups.  If you've got a maintenance
contract or not, you may want to try to find a local disk-refurbishing
service.  Here in Portland the charge for that is about $200, which is
a lot cheaper than buying a new drive and reloading your software.

							-dave

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