DiamondMax 9 noises

[William Mooney]

I have a DiamondMax 9 120Gb hard drive installed in a computer I built a few
weeks ago (Model 6Y120P0), and I'm concerned about some of the noises it's
making!

When powered off the drive makes quite a "clunk" presumably when the drive
heads are moved away from the platter. I'm not sure if this is normal.

Secondly (and more bizarrely) using certain functions of my graphics
programs causes the drive to omit a squeeling type noise. This happens when
I lasso something in Photoshop. The drive omits a light squeeling noise
until I finish selecting an area. It also happens when I'm selecting part of
the screen for screen capture using Paintshop Pro. Does anyone have an idea
what this noise is?

Seeks tend to be pretty loud too, but from what I've read this seems to be a
"feature".

Cheers,
Will

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a DiamondMax 9 120Gb hard drive installed in a computer I built a few
weeks ago (Model 6Y120P0), and I'm concerned about some of the noises it's
making!

When powered off the drive makes quite a "clunk" presumably when the drive
heads are moved away from the platter. I'm not sure if this is normal.

Secondly (and more bizarrely) using certain functions of my graphics
programs causes the drive to omit a squeeling type noise. This happens when
I lasso something in Photoshop. The drive omits a light squeeling noise
until I finish selecting an area. It also happens when I'm selecting part of
the screen for screen capture using Paintshop Pro. Does anyone have an idea
what this noise is?

Seeks tend to be pretty loud too, but from what I've read this seems to be a
"feature".

Might just be a "sound-enhancing" case and too little memory for
Photoshop to do the operation in memory only. It the uses the
HDD as secondary storage with a lot of fast, small accesses.

The "clunk" on switch-off is normal for Maxtor.

Arno

 

[William Mooney]

Thanks for that. I was pretty convinced the little "knock" sound on power
down was a normal park noise.

To set my mind at ease a bit further, I ran a series of diagnostics on the
drive using Maxtor software. They came back with nothing. Strangely the
noise during disk access using the graphics software has since reduced!
I'm not sure if a nice long sector by sector check of my hard drive has
helped things somehow. Weird!

 

[William Mooney]

p.s. the noise using the graphics programs is now more like a chirp. lol