Seagate ST-251 Sound

This is the typical hollow knocking noise the budget ST-251 drives from Seagate make during spinning up and spinning down. This particular one is exceptionally noisy. It works perfectly though, with no reported bad sectors or whatsoever. It just makes a lot of noise, as we are to expect with Seagate.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• seagate
• st-251
• hollow
• knocking
• noise
• sound
• startup
• spin
• up
• down
• vintage
• hard
• disk
• drive

[pfeitosa]

Thanks uploader! This is time travelling to 1991 and my AT 286...

[McVaio]

@pfeitosa

You're welcome! :)

Yes, back in those days, the hard drives had the most distinctive sound of the whole computer. Today they're completely silent so computers don't have that kind of personality anymore...

[an65001]

This is not the noise...this drive has been bashed in...

[McVaio]

@an65001

It works fine...

[EDHKilian]

well your hdd fails( knock of death ), my does it too, lower the screws to fix it ( worked at me )

[McVaio]

@EDHKilian

It still works, I don't know what causes the harsh knock. What screws exactly are you referring to?

[MrComputerfan]

@McVaio Thats the Normal Seektest of the MLC-0 model.

[30zSamu]

I have a HDD like this too. It's sending a message to Mars. :D

[Brutuzthegtamaster]

@an65001 Ever worked on any MFM or the like drives? They nearly all did stuff like this.

[HoneycombAgent]

@McVaio That knocking sound is the stepper motor going past track 0 or going to park.

[BartManNL]

The sound of nostalgia! Them SSDs are boringly quiet...

If these disks run for a long, lóng time, the bearing starts to wear out and they develop a more whining noise, probably the precessing of the axis.

[lee4hmz]

@the731272 There's actually an adjustable crash stop inside the drive that it's banging against. One of the neat things about these old Seagate drives is that they know exactly how far to move the heads to get to track 0 -- but only if they're parked correctly. Otherwise, they have to guess, and that's what the banging is.

The floppies Apple IIs used did the same thing, since they didn't have a track zero sensor.

[lee4hmz]

@McVaio What's actually happening is that the drive can't find the signal at the inner diameter of the disk that tells the onboard CPU that it's parked. ST-225s do the same thing if they're not parked before you turn them off.

[marbles4421]

is it a bird, is it a plane no its a bus!