Hitachi 1 TB Hard Drive

[Simon]

Buying one of these cheapo 7200 RPM HDD is a huge mistake.

I guess I now have to live with the mistake, I won't pitch it or pawn it off to burden someone else. I am sitting next to a coffee grinder. I have heard people snore quieter. I plan to buy a new one to clone this on it and the install this one as a slave drive for backups. Any opinions on Seagate or WD? I have used both, this is my first Hitachi and it just won't shut up. Seems to grind a lot and I was looking at my cache settings to make it mellow out but no luck.

Moral of the story...
DON'T BUY HITACHI HDDs!

[woodsmoke]

Ok
a dichotomous key

1) PIck it up while running and "hold it close to your ear". if you hear a very loud and irritating whirring sound to go step C.
2) Pick it up and while running and "hold it close to your ear". If you do not hear a very loud and irritating whirring sound please consider that you have read too many of Woodsmoke's posts.

a) you hear a very loud and irritating whirring sound. go to step C
b) you do not hear a very loud and irritating whirring sound . replace the device on the table top becaue it was a problem with the housing stop here or consider a sound dampening thing go to step D

step C) hit it with a hammer to determine if it will stop whirring if it does stop here if it does not go to step D

step D)
D1) consider a sound dampening thing such as placing it on a foam thing that does not obstruct air flow if it works stop here.
D2) if the sound dampening thing does not work go to step E.

Step E
a) move the device far enough away from where you sit so that you are not irritated. stop.
b) repeat step C. If this does not work go to:

Step F interior to the United States. The United States Legislature has authorized you to pound the device with a hammer, in contravention to the sheet of paper with fifty languages saying that nobody is responsible.
Step F exterior to the United States. You are screwed refer to "1)" addendum 1a or 1b)

Addendum 1a) Expect to have the telephonic device play an undening loop of irritating music and not ever contact a cusrtomer service representative
Addendum 1b) Expect to listen on the telephonic device to people of any language with which you are not familiar but you are cautioned to not throw the telephonic device at the wall where you previously threw spaghetti and it did, or did not, stick.

[GreyGeek]

Woodsmoke, in a previous life did you work for the IRS as a writer of instructions to fulfill the paperwork reduction requirement act?

[Simon]

Oh god, Woodsmoke you got me laughing in tears! Thanks I needed that. I am going to order a 2 TB HDD by Seagate next month. I just had to tell people that Hitachi makes horrible HDDs. I was wondering what other products they make and found they build aircraft engines and heavy machinery as well. I am not surprised since this sounds a lot like an aircraft engine or heavy machinery.

[jlittle]

I have a 1 TB WD Black that grinds just at or below my hearing, which makes the PC case, and the floor it sits on, act as sound boards. Drives me nuts. The original drive that came with the PC I returned because the grinding was audible.

I only use it for backups and stuff like pictures and videos; my boot drive is an SSD. So I spin it down:

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda

If I try and use it, there's a few seconds delay while it spins up. I have a little stub executable, not a script, that chains to the command so that I can setuid root and not have to use sudo, and a desktop entry so it's just a click in my panel. There must be a way to spin it down on boot and resume from suspend, but I've forgotten how to set that up and haven't bothered yet.

[oshunluvr]

LOL, funny thread.

Yes, you definitely get what you pay for when it comes to hard drives. If you want quiet and cool, you have to give up performance - at least generally. I've had many Seagates, Hitachis, and Western Digitals over the years, and even a couple Samsungs. IME, Western Digital has the most reliable drives at the best price point. On another thread, I detailed the removal of a 6 or 7 year old 2TB WD "Black" drive with over 58,000 hours of power on time. Not bad for a drive with a 3 year warranty. When it was new, I upgraded it with WD Enterprise class firmware and used it in my desktop for a couple years before moving it to my server. Running 24/7 in a small, warm box didn't hurt it a bit. It's sister drive is still in my desktop (used for backups) with 51000+ hours on it. It's showing a couple errors and soon will go to the hard drive graveyard.

I also have a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 75,000+ Power_On_Hours with ZERO reallocated sectors. Yes, it's a little noisier than the WD drive it sit's on top of, but it hard to argue about that kind of longevity.

Obviously, how a drive is mounted can make a huge difference too. My desktop case has removable trays that rest on plastic runners and rubber grommet-ed pins instead of screws to hold the drives in place. Neither drive is noticeable over the PSU fan. Simon, I wonder if you pulled the drive free of it's mount and let it run if it's still that noisy?

Jlittle, you probably know this already, but the Black series drives are "Desktop Performance" class drives. Not really intended for how you're using it now. A "Green" model would be a better choice IMO - if you're replacing that one any time soon. Of course, a nice and totally silent SSD would be the best choice!

[woodsmoke]

Simon and GG

aww thanks!

woody

[jlittle]

Jlittle, you probably know this already, but the Black series drives are "Desktop Performance" class drives. Not really intended for how you're using it now. A "Green" model would be a better choice IMO - if you're replacing that one any time soon. Of course, a nice and totally silent SSD would be the best choice!

The machine was specced up overall for performance, with various dreams of how it might be used; overall, I got what I paid for (3 s boot, millions of lines of code per minute build times).

I looked up how to run stuff on resuming from suspend; there's a lot of outdated information, because it changed with systemd, and systemd keeps moving. (As usual the Arch wiki has the best info, but debian is slightly different.) On my bionic the place is /lib/systemd/system-sleep, with "post" the parameter. There should be a way in the KDE solid framework, but not much is implemented in that.

Regards, John Little

[oshunluvr]

BTW, just looked at the WD Black I pulled two days ago - still works but was beginning to report "smart" errors so I removed it from my array. The manufacture date on it is "16 Dec 2010." Seven years and 4 months. Not bad for a 3-year warrantied drive!

[oshunluvr]

Jlittle: Have you tried this:

https://dominicm.com/force-hard-driv...-ubuntu-14-04/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hd-idle/files/

I know also some tools, like smartctl daemon, will "tickle" a drive causing it to wake up.

[jlittle]

Jlittle: Have you tried this:

https://dominicm.com/force-hard-driv...-ubuntu-14-04/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hd-idle/files/

That spins drives down after, say, 10 minutes. I want the hard drives down straightaway, but not if I'm using them, so a short idle time would be annoying. Its focus is external drives, which I imagine is hard to do, compared to the drives supported by hdparm. That project was for 14.04, before systemd I think, so how one sets up that sort of thing has been changing. Does systemd honour the old /etc/rc.local file? I'll have to try it out.

I know also some tools, like smartctl daemon, will "tickle" a drive causing it to wake up.

Baloo was doing that, I think, till I told it not to.

[Simon]

Oshunluvr it is somewhat quieter now that I turned off the Baloo file indexing. To answer the mounting question, no it is mounted in plastic runners. It has a loud read / write (I assume the heads movement within the shell are not sound dampened at all?) the former drives in this machine was WD 500 GB and Seagate 500 GB. I decided to toss all the data on one TB hard drive. The 2 former drives are put up but were getting old. Six years you say? The 2 old drives I stored away, the oldest is 10 years, and the other 7 years. I assume your drives are more active than mine. I can live with this drive for now, but still plan to find a quieter replacement in May. I looked at SSD but they are not as big or fast.

As some of you know, I am a doctor who studies cancer and as they say genetics is "my thing" so I was enlightened to read this; Harvard DNA Hard Drive This is an old article and it will be a reality when I am an old man. But 700 TB on something the size of a paper clip is awesome.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting article, even if it is 6 years old. Because of that the author could not have been aware of research only two months later which showed that the half-life of DNA is only 521 years, not the "hundreds of thousands of years" the article claimed!

Even so, that makes DNA more viable as a storage medium than CDs or, perhaps, USB sticks or even SSD's.

The "19 bit address block" at the start of each strand means that a total of 524,288 strands can be cataloged. Not too many, IMO, but each strand can be loooooonnnnnngggggg! They would have to be in order to store 5 petabytes.

I also got to thinking what would happen if one combination of (T and G = 1, A and C = 0) sequences almost approximated some genome which is super lethal or super strengthening got into the environment and was picked up by insects, plants or people? Andromeda Strain? The Hulk!

[oshunluvr]

75,000 Power-On-Hours makes my Hitachi drive Eight-and-a-half years of actual spin time! It's ten or so on the calendar...

[woodsmoke]

VERY interesting thread!

woodlikesitsmoke