Noisy Maxtor Drive

Ron,

What model is your drive?

thanks,
dave

Both IBM (Hitachi now) and Maxtor used to have a little utility for their ATA drives that would quiet them down; basically they slowed the head positioning (that's the normal chatter sound you hear). I don't know if Maxtor has updated it for the SATA drives but you could check. I'm using their MaxLine 300GB drive and have sort of the opposite problem: it's so quiet I'm not sure sometimes if its doing anything. So that would be one recommendation for you if you are going to swap drives; the MaxLine and DiamondMax10 in 250 & 300GB have models available with 16MB of cache memory which really helps to speed performance up, as well.

Ron,

You wrote: "hard drive is quite noisy."

Is it noisy when just spinning?
Is it noisy when the heads are seeking?

I have the Maxtor 80GB drive in my PowerMac and I only hear a slight ticking sound when the heads are moving in and out.

,dave

Ron, what you have is actually the 25zero model, not 25oh. The good news is that it's a DiamondMax 10 with 16MB cache - I had to buy one outright to replace the stock drive in my iMac G5. This is a heck of a fine and fast drive; if you want to see just how fast check out Barefeats' view of its slightly bigger brother's performance in a recent "shootout" - it's basically the fastest SATA drive of its size you can buy.

Don't know what to tell you about the noise - mine are almost silent. Sure you hear a little clickedity clack when the heads are searching but otherwise all of my Maxtors are dead silent; are you experiencing some kind of whine or something?

Anyway they have a spec for sound performance and if yours is over that you'd be entitled to a new drive: go to Maxtor's web site and read the PDF tech specs on your model. Or if you are still in toll-free support days at Apple give them a jingle and see what they will do for you.

Mine sounds like a geiger counter for a brief period now and then, It does not bother me. I can tell that something is happening with the sound. When I first bring up the widgets i hear the sound but not thereafter. Some people want total silence from everything.