Strange Noise

[nickb_rock]

Sorry if this is a little off topic, but I'm experiencing a concerning noise coming from my new build and would appreciate any of your help.

There's this strange almost knocking sound coming from either my HDD array or my SSD's. I know the SSD's have no moving parts but when I have iStat menus open and hear the sound, suddenly theres a random spike on those two SSD's showing read and write activity. So far that's the only correlation I've found. I have posted an audio recording of this sound on my dropbox if somebody can just help me figure out what they think it may be coming from. It happens every two minutes or so, and I'm starting to get a little worried

Ignore the fan noise, mic was right next to them
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7008424/hdd or ssd sound.wav

Setup is as follows:
GA-Z77X-UP5 TH
i7 3770k
Corsair Vengeance 16GB
EVGA GeForce GTX680

2x 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD's -- Software RAID 0 -- boot drive
4x 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM (ST2000DM001) -- Software RAID 0 8tb -- media storage

 

[nickb_rock]

I'm really hoping somebody can help me out, the sound seems to be happening more frequently.. its happening more than once per minute now


I recorded it again here
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7008424/hdd_or_ssd_sound2.wav

 

[anibalin]

Similar setup. Same issue.
Clueless.

 

[nickb_rock]

Similar setup. Same issue.
Clueless.

anibalin, it seems like its the Seagate Barracuda's making the noises actually. Not that anybody else seems to have any interest in this right now, but I've done some research and its a firmware issue. Latest firmware is CC4H --but you're gonna run into some problems, I have anyway..

To check your drive's firmware click the apple logo in the top left corner of your screen, go to about this mac > more info > system report. Under the hardware section click Serial-ATA then you'll see your ST2000DM001 hard drives which are affected with the seagate chirp issue. When you click one of them it will give you more information, your firmware version is right next to "Revision:" Mine is CC4B and I'm having one hell of a time trying to update these things to CC4H

Seagate has posted an update for non-windows users which requires you to create a bootable CD/DVD or USB drive to run the FreeDOS operating system and their Firmware Upgrade Utility. The problem for me is that I cannot get my motherboard to boot FreeDOS natively for some reason, and I get error messages saying it can't find an operating system every time. I also tried running virtualBox which worked temporarily until I found out your motherboard has to be set to IDE mode not AHCI in the BIOS, which means Mac OS X will not boot either.

Anybody know of any solutions?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Interesting problem - one I hadn't heard of before - but if Seagate have posted a firmware update to fix the issue then so it must be!

FreeDOS is just a free version of an O/S similar to MS-DOS and so needs to have the SYS command run on the boot media or Formatted with the -S switch (if memory serves me - it's a few years now...) to make it bootable. In the root of the disk should be COMMAND.COM and perhaps an AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. The SYS command copies and hides a couple of system files there too.

(By the way the "FreeDOS 1.0 Floppy" is the bootable download, though it is a floppy-disk sized image. I realise a USB floppy drive and spare disk are rarities nowadays but you can still burn a bootable CD from the files on the other ISO images).

Perhaps the Seagate support pages go into more detail, or have automated the process. Certainly the boot media will need some kind of system file to recognise the Seagate hard disk you have - or perhaps it doesn't need to recognise the full size to upload the firmware. Research needed ... (www.freedos.org)

With your BIOS set to boot from the new media you will either go through an automatic sequence (through the script in AUTOEXEC.BAT) or be presented with a C:\ prompt from where to issue another firmware flashing program.

You've probably figured all this out by now, but if not it's a relatively simple process once you've got it clear in your mind what FreeDOS is etc...

Best of luck!

 

[anibalin]

Fixed it. Turns out, in my case, It was the cpu voltaje. Went to the bios and I turned it -down- a noch and the noise went away.
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyt...noise-whith-c-sates-enabled-3.html#post353535