Disk noises and Tyan S2468UGN

[Joel Jaeggli]

Thermal recalibration of the head sounds like the most likely cause...

joelja

On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, David Mathog wrote:

> Our S2468UGN has 5 x 36 GB IBM disks in it, 2 on one
> SCSI bus, 3 on the other.  These are IBM  IC35L036UWD210-0.
> They work fine, pass all diagnostics, including exhaustive
> surface testing using IBM's Drive Fitness Test 3.10.  But the odd
> thing is that there is a semiperiodic (mean maybe 20 seconds, but
> huge variance) noise from one or more of the disks which sounds
> for all the world like a quieter version of a DLT tape repositioning. 
> That is, a longish (1.5 seconds?) whir followed immediately by a
> shorter sort of "shunk" at the end.  Some sort of movement sound,
> but not anything that sounds like an overt failure.
> 
> I can't see the individual drive lights on these disks because
> of the way they are mounted, in fact, I don't even know that
> they have drive lights, so I can't really say if this is one drive
> doing this or all 5 drives doing it once in a while.  The main system
> drive light does not come on when this sound is made.  I upgraded
> to the latest Tyan BIOS (v4.03) and it still occurs.  The sound is
> produced whenever there is power: sitting in the BIOS, waiting in
> DOS, running linux, etc.
> 
> Has anybody else observed this?
> Any idea what it might be?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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Joel Jaeggli	      Academic User Services   joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu    
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