High pitched squeal/whine/warble

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <38568 at bbn.COM> pschmidt at BBN.COM (Peter H. Schmidt) writes:
|>I bought my 3B1 (2M/40M 3.51) 3rd hand about 3 months ago.  When I first got
|>it, it would whine occasionally, with about a 2 minute quiet period in
|>between whines.  It has now progressed to the point where it is whining/
|>warbling constantly.  It is hard to localize the source of the sound,
|>but I'm afraid it's the disk, since I can hear the fan running quietly
|>in the back.
|>
|>SO, what I'm asking is a) has anyone had this happen to their box (and
|>did it precede a major disk failure)? b) does the 3B1 have a history of
|>bearing lossage in it's hard drives? and c) can any of you hardware gurus
|>walk me through a simple diagnostic procedure to pin the problem down
|>better?
|>
...
Squeaky drives seems to be a very common thing, especially when your 
environment is a little dustier that it should be.  My 2nd hard drive on my
UNIX pc, had this problem a few weeks ago.  It seems like the dust that the
fan pulls through the external hard drive case (and in your case the
UNIX pc case itself) was slowly making this sound more noticable.  Finally
it became too annoying not to ignore, so we took the hard drive apart.
Basically (on the Miniscribe) we removed 4 or 5 hex nuts, to remove the
main logic board on the hard drive.  Under the logic board you will notice
a metal tab (which is used for static discharge while the drive is spining).
Mine was coated with dust-bunnies. Carefully remove the dust from the
static tab and drive mechanism itself ("Q-tips" are useful in this procedure).
Also lift slightly on the tab so that it will hit more firmly on the
drive mechanism (this will hopefully decrease, or stop the noise completely).
A dab of silcon grease on the tip of the tab might be helpful also...
The noise doesn't seem to be related to any unexplained HDERR's ...

... Ahhh to sleep easier at night ...

							-Lenny

-- 
Lenny Tropiano             ICUS Software Systems         [w] +1 (516) 582-5525
lenny at icus.islp.ny.us      Telex; 154232428 ICUS         [h] +1 (516) 968-8576
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