Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I have a 2TB Hitachi SATA drive that never stops seeking!
It starts beavering away as soon as it comes up to speed and unlocks the heads, and only quiets down when reading or writing large files. It keeps this up constantly until it decides to go to sleep. It has always done this.

Anyone else see something like that? I spent some time searching and discovered that Western Digital has a feature called "Preemptive Wear Leveling" but nothing about Hitachi. Seems like a worthless feature in any case, as magnetic disks don't require any wear leveling.

Any chance it's a normal thermal recalibration routine? http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic. ... 1&t=692435

It's not uncommon with warmer or high rpm drives in confined boxes, like Indys.

The disk seeks all the time, cold or hot, rain or shine; just like the post office. If it was tcal I'd expect it to stop after at most several seconds, but it does it continuously.

Edit: I should correct that. It's only most of the time that it seeks constantly: sometimes for an unexplained reason it stops and sounds "normal".

robespierre wrote: The disk seeks all the time, cold or hot, rain or shine; just like the post office. If it was tcal I'd expect it to stop after at most several seconds, but it does it continuously.

Either the NSA or Google has installed a search program in your underwear drawer. It is inspecting your drive for old photos of Jedgar in lace panties and a bra.

No idea what happens if it finds any but you best look out

Does the disk thrashing show up in activity monitor/task manager/etc ? Should not be that hard to find the offending process unless it really is the disk itself.

It actually does this even when no computer is attached. And it doesn't flash the disk activity light, so it is something internal to the drive controller.

once i had a disk with similar issues. i ended up replacing it.

foetz wrote: once i had a disk with similar issues. i ended up replacing it.

The one I just butchered does that same thing. Either it's normal and we just don't see it because the cover is opaque, or Robes has a problem

Try a low-level format and replace the file system ? Isn't there a control track that does the timing and so on ? If that's messed up, there's nothing you can fix .... on the antique Shugarts you could re-write that but probably not on a new Hitachi

Don't worry, it'll die soon and you can go through the warranty replacement dance...

<Tinfoilhatmode>virus! Virus in the disk itself!

Well, I suppose it's possible...