The Mysterious Ticking Noise

No, it's not a pipe bomb, it's my two brand new 1.5TB Seagate drives waiting to go off.

Thanks a bunch, Seagate.  That's two critical firmware bugs in your leading product in the space of two months.

I've just ordered two 1TB Western Digital drives and a dual-bay external case.  There's a firmware upgrade coming from Seagate, but I don't trust that not to make things worse, so I'm going to back everything up first.

Update: I was planning to order one more of the 1.5TB drives.  That would have been a lot  cheaper (two 1TB drives plus the external case is about the same price as two 1.5TB drives) and would have given me enough room to back everything up, and it's pretty unlikely that more than one of the Seagates would have bricked themselves at once.  Probably.  Eh.  Oh well.  All the extra hours I'm spending at my day job that have been keeping me from mee.nu have at least been paying me reasonably well, so I can afford it.

Update: My drives might not be affected.  The great majority of reported failures so far have been on the SD15 firmware, and my two drives are SD17 and SD19.  Found an online database tracking 80-odd failures, and none of them were on those revisions.  So I might have just spent a few hundred dollars for...  Well, for a nice 2TB USB/eSATA external drive.

Update: The Windows Search service really slows things down when you're trying to do backups.  And it's a stubborn little bugger.  I stopped it, and performance improved for a while, and then things got slower and slower and maybe my drive was on the way out but no!  Windows Search had started itself up again.

So I broke its legs.

Update: My shiny new 1TB drives are Caviar Green models - which the online store didn't say - which are 5400RPM - which Western Digital doesn't say.  Shades of 1992.  On the other hand, they use just 2.8W when idle, which is perfect for an external drive case.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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