Noisy profile hard drive

[Jules Richardson]

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