Anyone else's WD 640GB AAKS make beeping noises?

[Blue Falcon]

I've had twin 640GB Western Digital AAKS drives in my rig for a few days now, ordered them fresh from Newegg a couple of weeks ago. I've noticed a very quiet 'beep' or possibly a high pitched relay sound coming from one (or both) of the drives... it sounds almost like the drive was returning from a power-off state, except my system isn't set to power the drives down at any time - even during inactivity.

It's been several years since I've owned a WD drive, I've been a Seagate guy for all those years.... so is this normal?

[axan]

i used 6 diff wd 640 aaks drives, none of them beep

[techie81]

No beeps, they are actually very quiet.

[Yamaki]

What are you doing when these "beeps" occur?

If you do any gaming on your rig, the noise might just be capacitor squealing on your video card. This usually occurs when the card is under high stress (some loading screens in some games, or constant squealing if you run Folding@Home)

[Blue Falcon]

What are you doing when these "beeps" occur?

If you do any gaming on your rig, the noise might just be capacitor squealing on your video card. This usually occurs when the card is under high stress (some loading screens in some games, or constant squealing if you run Folding@Home)

Nope, I actually haven't done any gaming on the machine since I rebuilt it a few days ago (that's when the new drives were put in).

For the record, caps don't sqeal (well, not unless they are bulging and boiling out electrolyte) - inductors (coils) do. That's the noise you are referring to and I'm pretty familliar with it, although as my ears have aged I'll admit I'm not as prone to hearing high frequency inductor whine as I used to be. By the way, that squeal is actually the coil in the inductor physically vibrating at super-high frequency. Neat eh?

Anyway the noise I'm hearing isn't constant. It's very momentary lasting no more than 1/4th of a second. And there is a kind of 'click' immediately preceding it. Again it almost sounds like the drive was powered down and decided to 'wake up' and spin up.

I'm going to pull the rig apart tomorrow and check for a loose SATA power cable.

[Blue Falcon]

Here is the HDTune info for both of the 640GB AAKS drives installed in my machine. The first one is my boot / OS drive, and the second one I use for storage and for video editing and storage.

http://www.bbpix.com/files/1/drive0.png
http://www.bbpix.com/files/1/drive1.png

Look at the start/stop count on the second drive and how it doesn't match the power cycle count. Meanwhile the first drive both values match... Also note that both drives have been powered up the same exact amount of time - 52 hours total sofar.

I've just checked again and Windows Vista x64 is set NEVER to put the drives in sleep mode. But that's certainly what this drive appears to be doing at random.

No red flags in HDTune, everything checks out even the performance tests. Aside from the odd noises three or four times a day it seems fine. *shrug*

[Blue Falcon]

I hope I don't jinx myself, but I think I found my problem last night...

http://www.bbpix.com/files/1/punky_skunk%20007.JPG

That's one of those fancy SATA cables with the clip, except the clip is missing! It was just BARELY hanging in the drive connector. So maybe it was randomly losing connection? Hope so. Replaced the cable so we shall see. :)

[Copyright]

Did this fix your problem? I am having a simliar issue with a 640gb that seems to power itself down and I notice it takes a couple seconds to wake up when I access the drive.