Noisy profile hard drive

From: Ron Hudson <ron.hudson_at_sbcglobal.net>
Date: Thu Dec 30 16:25:32 2004

Once upon a time, I was an operator for a ring of Apollo domain
machines. One of them had a
drive that had a static drain spring (a leaf spring that touches the
end of the spindle) that
would take to "singing", a loud shriek. When this would happen, I was
told to take the side off
the apollo machine and ever so gently touch the spring. Worked like a
charm, the spring would
shut up for up to three weeks but it would always get back to it again.

On Dec 30, 2004, at 11:30 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 14:16 -0500, John Lawson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, chris wrote:
>>
>>> I've got someone asking me about a Profile hard drive in a Lisa
>>> 2/10. He
>>> says it makes a loud screaming noise when it is running. Maybe bad
>>> bearings?
>>
>>
>> 72 years ago, I was in charge of an early 3Com LAN, with drives in
>> stacked 'shoeboxes'. I came in one Monday morning to find one of the
>> drives making this thin 'shrieking' noise.
>>
>> I of course did a panic shutdown and got the Vendor rolling -
>> turns out
>> that it was the Absolute Filter on top of the drive case making the
>> same
>> kind of noise that one makes by blowing across a piece of taut paper.
>> The
>> tech just pressed down on the aluminum cover at the edge of the filter
>> 'pod' and that fixed it.
>>
>> I was sure the heads had crashed, but somehow the system was still
>> running - though I couldn't see how, since it sounded like the heads
>> were
>> milling the platters into expensive red dust.
>
> Nice story - first time I've heard that.
>
> Other end of the scale, I've had a drive in a Whitechapel make a noise
> like this before and it lasted about ten minutes on the bench before
> the
> heads went crunch.
>
> I've also got a Rodime drive (32MB I think) for a BBC micro that
> screams
> - only the scream comes and goes, plus changes in pitch. Sounds very
> like bare metal on metal contact, but the drive ran for long enough to
> copy data across to a replacement (and is still running, I just don't
> have any call to use it)
>
> Personally I'd back up that Profile drive if there's critical data on
> it
> (if there's a way!) and be looking for a replacement drive... (can
> Profiles use anything other than an ST506?)
>
> cheers
>
> Jules
>
Received on Thu Dec 30 2004 - 16:25:32 GMT