# Seagate HD infamous "Chiriping" figured out. :)



## RigRebel (Apr 12, 2012)

Well I stumbled on a cause for the Infamous Seagate "Chirping" on the new Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB/1 Platter Hard-drives. I have had 4 drives do this and  It appears,that on my system, the whole thing is attributed to the combonation of an HP DVD SATA I drive using a SATA II cable on the same SATA II mobo as the SATA III Seagate drive lol. I happened on this by accident while removing the DVD to quickly install a backup drive to transfer files from to the Seagate. Prior to removing the HP DVD, the Seagate drive was chirping and I had just bought it an hour earlier from a store front. When I removed the HP DVD and put a backup Hitatchi HD in with the Seagate the chirping stopped. I have not heard it for a solid 4-5 hours and the chirp was happening about every 3-5 minutes. 

Now in defense, both drives work fine when only one or the other is present but together the "chirping" appears and it is coming from the Seagate drive. It kind of makes sense. I spent 30min on the phone with Seagate tech support prior to stumbling on this cause and the only explination they could provide was the chirping was "power related" but I tried the drive on 2 different powersupplies. I'm lucky I stumbled on the cause. I haven't tried a fix yet but I'll try putting the HP DVD on a seperate power lead, replacing the sataII cable with a sata I and if need be just upgrading to a sataIII or sata II DVD. Was planing on getting IB sata III mobo but waiting till Haswell. 

Spread this around if possible. 
but now the dang drive is clicking.. honestly this is my 4th seagate drive since Jan. and they are CRAP.

UPDATE: 40minutes later.... 
Well I replaced the SATA II cable on the SATA I HP DVD with a SATA I cable and YEP that did it! Confirmed. Having the matching SATAI cable has eliminated the chirping (and faint clicking has dissapeared aswell) on the Seagate sata III HD for over 40min.. 
Wow this one was a WIERD one. Technically, I didn't do anything wrong because the SATAI DVD had worked with that Sata II cable and another SATAII HD for years with no problems. Again, by themselves, each drive worked fine; but, when I added the SATAIII Seagate ST1000DM003 HD in with the HP DVD SataI on a SATA II cable the chirp happened. I don't think Seagate is aware of the cause because 30min with 2 techs today came up with no answer. 
All in all this is a good "better safe than sorry" lesson for making sure your cables match exactly with the devices standard even if a newer standard is backwards compatible.

Peace.


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## xBruce88x (Apr 12, 2012)

so much for backwards compatible. that's an interesting situation and i'm glad you found a fix for it.


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## RigRebel (Apr 12, 2012)

xBruce88x said:


> so much for backwards compatible. that's an interesting situation and i'm glad you found a fix for it.



Fudge... just heard one single chirp.. dangit first one in over 6 hours... ok i'll replace the old sata I drive tomorrow with a sata II to be safe... thanks for post  

night


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## xBruce88x (Apr 12, 2012)

haha, could be the SATA-I cable coming loose, they had a bad habit of doing that... once the connection starts to get loose all sorts of crazy things happen.


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## RigRebel (Apr 12, 2012)

xBruce88x said:


> haha, could be the SATA-I cable coming loose, they had a bad habit of doing that... once the connection starts to get loose all sorts of crazy things happen.



lol true, i didn't use the locking sata tab cables... but honestly this is a good excuse for a new blue ray drive  lol 

I never did like this HP DVD it was noisy. I do still think I'm on to something cause the 4-5 hours on with the DVD removed and jsut the two HDs was the quitest 4-5 hours yet  .. heading to Zzzzzzzzz land. 
Peace.


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## OneMoar (Apr 12, 2012)

ACHI Mode ? head parking disabled ?


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## Yo_Wattup (Apr 12, 2012)

so you bought 4 seagate drives despite them being crappy... not sure if trolling..


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> ACHI Mode ? head parking disabled ?



Excellent point Moar, My good friend (also a tech) just mentioned the same thing. I am running in ACHI mode and apparently since my board is only SATA II and I have no SSD, AHCI could is not necessary and could be causing SATA power-related problems... I think you both may have something there. As of right now I put a different SATA I cable with locking tabs on and have not heard a chirp for @ 1hour. Which is incredible compared to how it was at first. IF it chirps again I will 



Yo_Wattup said:


> so you bought 4 Seagate drives despite them being crappy... not sure if trolling..



LOL .. No not exactly... I'll help you catch on lol.  I bought 2 in total and each got RMA'd once so 2+2 RMA = 4. However,  I bought one in Jan as soon as they came out to Newegg. That chirped and clicked it got RMA'd Week later got a second one came and on first boot sounded like someone packed rocks and screws in it and they all bounced around on first boot. I mean literally sounded like metal confetti being shot around in the HD case. The drive continued to click... *I got my money back and gave up *

Until last week, the Seagate 1TB drives went on sale for $79.00 at a local store just down the road and I heard the new firmware update fixed a bunch and I still really needed bigger drive; because, at the time, I was on a 5 year old 160GB Hitachi built like a tank. So, I bought my "officially" second Seagate drive in @3 months and it chirped. I called Seagate, they had no idea said return to store. The store I bought it from tried to pull crap on me and would only let me exchange so I got my 2nd RMA 4th drive total... understand ? up to speed now Troll killer ? But thank for assuming we're all stupid and trolling because WOW has warped your mind. LOL Or, Perhaps you've never had to RMA... that's a good thing. lol


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

RigRebel said:


> Excellent point Moar, My good friend (also a tech) just mentioned the same thing. I am runing in ACHI mode and apparently since my board is only SATA II and I have no SSD, AHCI could is not necessary and could be causing SATA power-related problems... I think you both may have something there. As of right now I put a different SATA I cable with locking tabs on and have not heard a chirp for @ 1hour. Which is incredible comparied to how it was at first. IF it chirps again I will
> 
> 
> 
> ...


try disabling AAM/AAPM http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/
the chip sound you are hearing is "normal" (it CAN cause excessive wear and tear ) is the drive spining down and the heads parking (hopefully lol ) 
disable HDD Power down in the windows power options and disable AAM/AAPM and see if that corrects it


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> try disabling AAM/AAPM http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/
> the chip sound you are hearing is "normal" is the drive spining down and the heads parking
> disable HDD Power down in the windows power options and disable AAM/AAPM and see if that corrects it



hmmm spining down ? not doubting you but most the time I hear it after I keep my hands off the keyboard and mouse for 5-10 min then pick up the mouse and single click on something... in essence seems like it happens after short periods of inactivity. Yes the suspend, hibernation and drive turning off have been turned to "never" 

I'll give it a try though  thank you. 


PS on the plus side I'm getting transfer rates of 93.2MB/sec min, 192.6MB/sec Max, and 152.9MB/sec average with 14.6ms ATime and 127Burst... very nice


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

RigRebel said:


> hmmm spining down ? not doubting you but most the time I hear it after I keep my hands off the keyboard and mouse for 5-10 min then pick up the mouse and single click on something... in essence seems like it happens after short periods of inactivity. Yes the suspend, hibernation and drive turning off have been turned to "never"
> 
> I'll give it a try though  thank you.



this is probly a worthless question but are you running a intel motherboard with a early version of the H67/P67 chipset ?
early versions of that chipset had a flaw that caused them to fail early


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> this is probly a worthless question but are you running a intel motherboard with a early version of the H67/P67 chipset ?
> early versions of that chipset had a flaw that caused them to fail early



Close, even earlier, P7H55... was a free Asus P7H55M-LE with i3-550 purchase. I got it sitting in a Aerocool QX-2000 atm waiting to morph into a very near future HTPC. Plus, At 3.2Ghz per core the little i3-550 actually is a sweet little dual chip mini gamer. 
Why, what's word on the H55 ? Any major flaws ?


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

RigRebel said:


> Close, even earlier, P7H55... was a free Asus P7H55M-LE with i3-550 purchase. I got it sitting in a Aerocool QX-2000 atm waiting to morph into a very near future HTPC. Plus, At 3.2Ghz per core the little i3-550 actually is a sweet little dual chip mini gamer.
> Why what's word on the H55 ? Any major flaws ?



not affected nm then


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

if you could make a recording lol ... hard to tell what it is because I can't hear it


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> not affected nm then



kk, thanks for the geniune help/interest in helping me  .. so far it's quite as a mouse... I think taking the SATA I drive off the SATA II cable and putting it on a SATAI cable has done the trick. hopefully. If not I'll try the link fix you sent and hacking reg to enhance IDE mode and chaning in bios... 




OneMoar said:


> if you could make a recording lol ... hard to tell what it is because I can't hear it



The sound is kinda like a cross between a fish smacking the top of the water with their lips and a bad UPS doing a single chirp becaus battery is low.. lol that's actually incredibly accurate


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

never use IDEMODE its bad ... and its slow ...... very slow ... on modern drives it has a impact of 20% or more over AHCI


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> never use IDEMODE its bad ... and its slow ...... very slow ... on modern drives it has a impact of 20% or more over AHCI



check new post edit above 

it litterally sounds like posted above and really like a "chirp" wierdest thing i've ever heard and never heard before this all started.


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

what you DO NOT WANNA hear is this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQfQ3ZVUd68
THAT is the sound of a very soon to be dead drive


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> what you DO NOT WANNA hear is this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQfQ3ZVUd68
> THAT is the sound of a very soon to be dead drive



lol yeah I don't even have to click that link I'm almost positive you're referring to the "click of death"lol. I work in IT desktop hardware support so I know that sound all to well.


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

its "normal" for them to chip once or thrice on boot up or coming out of standby
but if it starts doing it constantly when ever there is disk stress get your data the hell outta dodge


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

RigRebel said:


> lol yeah I don't even have to click that link I'm almost positive you're referring to the "click of death"lol. I work in IT desktop hardware support so I know that sound all to well.



in segates case its a choir of birds


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> its "normal" for them to chip once or thrice on boot up or coming out of standby



that's it that's it exactly.. normal ? my 5 year old hitachi never does .. and this is the first i've heard it.. if it's normal for seagates then coupled with my SATA I DVD findings I think it's a bad oversite in drive. It may be normal for Seagates but not normal for HDs in general imo. I think it's some problem combo with the sata controller, the SATA I drive on Sata II cable and the SATA 3 seagate... sounds like a stretch but it's 100% recreatable on my system every time
and after cable change no noise.. if no noise now then i know it's not "normal" for it. 

Lol yeah choir of birds exactly  lol 

sorry multi editing to avoid admin smack for double posting


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

RigRebel said:


> that's it that's it exactly.. normal ? my 5 year old hitachi never does .. and this is the first i've heard it.. if it's normal for seagates then coupled with my SATA I DVD findings I think it's a bad oversite in drive. It may be normal for Seagates but not normal for HDs in general imo.



my segate always "talked" to me when booting sounded like a old IDE drive doing a head check if you have ever heard a old early 90's pc boot you know the sound


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> my segate always "talked" to me when booting sounded like a old IDE drive doing a head check if you have ever heard a old early 90's pc boot you know the sound



lol .. well glad to know but that sucks .. did you have a combination of SATA I and other SATA drives on the same board?


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## OneMoar (Apr 13, 2012)

it was SATA II/IDE 
really tho the sata mode should have ZERO effect on the drive's mechanics its a electrical mode handled by the chip-set/drive controller


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## RigRebel (Apr 13, 2012)

OneMoar said:


> it was SATA II/IDE
> really tho the sata mode should have ZERO effect on the drive's mechanics its a electrical mode handled by the chip-set/drive controller



Agreed, in theory it should have absolutely made no effect; BUT, maybe that's why it's slipping by unnoticed as a cause ? Often the things you never would think of turn up being the root of the evil. And again, broken record, I can tailor recreate every time simply by changing the cable. Actually, I don't think it's the SATA Mode IDE vs AHCI but I do believe it's the SATA standards because they do change power settings per standard a little I believe. And yea this could all be only on certain boards because of chipset/sata bus controller on Mobo in combination with the other drives. I actually never would have thought of this as the cause cause it does make no sense. I stumbled on it by accident. 

gonna report my findings to Seagate tomorrow and see what they say and if they will test bench it on their end. Lol "Kill the chirp project 2012"


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## OneMoar (Jul 23, 2014)

You can use crystal disk info to disable APM witch also turns off head parking or you can just this
https://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/
ps: pay links and or affiliate file hosts are not allowed on TPU
thread is dead requesting lock


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## eidairaman1 (Jul 24, 2014)

Probably use Seagate Seatools for that too


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