[daniael]

hi there,

I just installed a new harddrive, second one this month and on startup (and then for about 10-15 minutes) a buzzing sound comes from the drive.
The sound stops after 15 minutes orso and doesn't come back. Not when idle
or on sleep.
When its making the noise it will go away when I put it to sleep so it must be the drive. (When the monitor sleeps the noise stays)

The other strange thing is that the noise reduces when I have a dark desktop.
Playing with a browser window on a dark desktop will re/induce the noise. When more then half of the screen is white, the noise is there and when more black no noise

I just swapped my drive for a new one today but this drive makes the same noise.
Its a Seagate 80 Gb / 7200rpm in a iMac 600mhz
Should I get a drive from a different brand?
Hope anyone knows what's going on....

thanks,
daniel

[superlarry]

sounds familiar - my 60 gig seagate barracuda did that. it's some "self-cleaning" mode or something that makes it do that, and it's a "feature" because it supposedly increases the reliability of the drive (what it's doing is a physical test on itself). it's supposed to come switched off by default, but maybe yours for some reason didn't. there's a utility to turn this mode off, but unfortunately you have to put your drive in a pc to do it. you won't lose any info on the drive, but this *should* solve your problem. somewhere on seagate's website you should be able to find this utility - it's in the form of a self-extracting boot-disk image.
or, if you have bad luck like me, you'll try that and it won't work, meaning your drive is bad.
beats me how you found *two* drives like this unless they're just older drives (more than a year) and the "feature" hasn't been disabled.

[daniael]

I've just put the drive in a pc and did
the 'SMSCAN.exe' but the noise is still there....

[COmie JOe]

Hmm, bad drives that s0x0rs