Noisy profile hard drive

[Ron Hudson]

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
>