High-pitched whining (hard drive *I think*)

[ColinAnderson]

I've been experiencing a high-pitched whining of late on my Dell Inspiron 8200. It's not extremely loud (the fans will drown it out when they're on), but it is loud enough to irritate me! It doesn't seem to happen in Windows XP, but as I prefer linux, it is troubling me. I've eliminated my RAM as the source of the problem (I've heard some RAM can "whine" under heavy use). However, this sound sounds like it is coming directly from the harddrive. Usually it makes this noise while idle -- but I'm sure I can hear it when the drives in use sometimes as well.

Sometimes when I click a button, move a window (usually a transparent window such as a console or something), the noise will stop for a split second, then begin again. Sometimes if I'm compiling something (say it's on the configure step, sending a new line to the console every second or so), it will tun on and off in concert with the scrolling text. When I'm changing from one web page to another, it will usually dissapear and reappear the same time the page is changed. When I scroll webpages, it will sometimes rapidly switch on and off. I tried to use procinfo to see if anything's being written to my harddrive when idle, but it doesn't look like it.

Another tid bit that might be of help: If I run procinfo -n the noise stops (while it's continuously updating the stats). If I run procinfo -n1, the noise stops for a breif second every time the numbers are updated, but is clearly audible the rest of the time.

Has anyone encountered this before? It's driving me up the wall.

One more thing, sorry. When I boot up, I can't hear the sound until about when the DMA on the drive is turned on (as near as I can tell from the rapidly scrolling text upon bootup). I've used hdparm to turn on and off DMA while in linux, but that does nothing.

Any ideas? Please help! I cannot take it much longer. Thanks.
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~Colin

[ChopChopMasterOnion]

we're having the same problem with the computer down at the firehouse but it's not died yet. Soon though I think. It's definitely coming from the hard drive on the one at the firehouse though, and sounds similar to your description.
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There are 10 types of people in this world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

[oneeyedelf1]

Ya I had a drive whine before, call up dell and tell them your hd whines, they will replace it. Mine they replaced with little fuss, the only problem is unlike desktop hds they are a little harder to install. Sometimes they make you hold the phone up to prove its whining umm just have something that makes some noise, the fans on the system could also do.

[ColinAnderson]

I let the Dell diagnostics software run for the last four hours while I was at work; according to it, everything performed optimally.

Thanks for the replies guys. When you replaced the drives, I guess it solved the noise problem? I just don't want to go through the hassle of resinstalling everything when I get a new drive, and still having the noise present. I could ghost it I guess....
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~Colin

[ChopChopMasterOnion]

well, I don't know if that will fix it yet. We're about to replace that whole computer, so we're just keeping all our backups extremely current. But the sound on ours is definitely the hard drive. I don't honestly know of anything else that can cause that sound from a hard drive software-wise.
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There are 10 types of people in this world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

[bungernut]

I have a net of four HD's for my Insperion 8200 of which each has its own unique sound. I am becoming convinced that some are just going to be loud, and believe me some are really bad (my fans are on??? bad) but none have crashed (yet). I think some are just made better than others.

[ChopChopMasterOnion]

perhaps, but if as is the case with the one I mentioned it were a new sound that came on rather suddenly on a rather old hard drive, i find myself suspecting its remaining days are few.
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There are 10 types of people in this world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

[ColinAnderson]

Take a look at this thread. This is EXACTLY what I'm experiencing.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=9754
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~Colin

[ChopChopMasterOnion]

well then, at least it probably isn't your hard drive. Good luck with it!
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There are 10 types of people in this world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.