High pitch sound every few seconds.

[schonhult]

I bought a new b3 during the summer campaign and I like it a lot. I have a b2 as well

However, there is a high pitch sound from the b3 every few seconds that drives me nuts. I can hear the noise when I watch tv. Its supposed to be always on in my living room, but I had to turn it of and use the old b2.

I remember old hard drives making such klickyish sounds but not any hard drives I have had in a decade.

Is this normal? Are there any settings to stop it from doing that?

Its broken isn't it?

[vladi]

I also have the same problema, I bought a B3 a couple a weeks ago and I can hear the same sound.
Constant hard drive activity with clickish sound.
Maybe someone should tell us what it's happening

[Ubi]

I guess you have a wd green disk. There are more complaints about noises for this drive. Mine is silent,so i guess this is a tech support issue.
https://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1517735/all

[schonhult]

Yes it seem to be the same problem.
So it is not covered by warranty. Works as intended.

<20 db is a lie with WD green drives. Makes me angry. But I guess I can try to use the old b2 drive in the b3 case to get it silent.

Is it possible to just switch the files on the drives to get the other harddrive working with the b3?

[Ubi]

yes, there are quite a few ways to do this (including dd, rsync with bound binds, clonezilla etc etc). For novelty users, these may be a bit complex. If however all your interesting data is in /home , I would advise to first put a fresh, updated OS from a rescue USB on the new HD, then connect the old HD externally and mount the old /home. then use rsync to move data from old home to new home.

[vladi]

Hi Schonhult,

After the upgrade to 2.6 and a restart, my problem with the hard drive disappeared . Check it out http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f ... &start=135

[schonhult]

Yes! it worked!

I had to manually install wdtIdle3_ARM.tar.gz then it was silent.

Ill leave it on a few days just to check, then Ill start migrating and playing around

Thanks!

[Gordon]

Yes! it worked!

I had to manually install wdtIdle3_ARM.tar.gz then it was silent.

Ill leave it on a few days just to check, then Ill start migrating and playing around

Thanks!

It will be fine. The sound you were hearing is from parking of the heads (and releasing them). The firmware patch reprograms the drive logic with a longer timeout value for this behaviour. Essentially that means the drive will become less green, but judging from the noise every few seconds that wouldn't have been the case anyway.

The better solution would of course be to run the system on an SSD. It should be okay to leave the original drive "green" parameters on the data disks, i.e. the disk(s) mounted on /home.That shouldn't be too costly as this can in fact be a rather small disk; anything over 10G would do.

[vladi]

After a few days it started to make the same sound

[Gordon]

My guess is that you may have had some unusual activity after the reboot. From what I found the upgrade to software version 2.6 will only execute the HDD patch if the previous version is less than 2.4. Since you came from 2.5.1.2 it wouldn't have executed the patch and you should run it manually following the steps shown by Cheeseboy (http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f ... &start=133)

[vladi]

Thanks for your reply. The thing is I already did run the script, but this time it didn't work.
Now my B3 server (which is on my desk, near the bed ) is "buzzing" all the time.
I don't know what to do anymore

[Gordon]

I'm not sure what you mean by "buzzing". What the patch does is set a longer delay for spinning down and parking the drive heads, which by the nature of the Linux operating system means that the drive will stay on spinning all the time. Hence the LCC not incrementing anymore, which is better for drive lifetime but less comfortable for someone sleeping with his ear next to it.

You may want to try placing the B3 somewhere else than on your desk, or if it has to be on your desk put it directly over a leg. Your desk may actually be amplifying small vibrations from the drive inside the B3.