Drive sounds

[Jacques]

So i have two 15k Worldisk (Fujitsu) 36gb drives in my O2. When I power the machine on and let the drives spin up they will start to make a ‘whoom-whoom’ sympathetic vibration humming sound as the revolutions of the two drives are near, but probably not 100% identical. Each drive on it’s own is perfectly fine. Any fix for this? (I doubt it).

i don’t really want to invest in any more scsi drives. I do have a 146gb seagate but it gets blistering hot! I would just pull one of the drives but it has most of my application archives.

 

[Elf]

You might try some mechanical decoupling from the drive tray / chassis; instead of using screws to fix the drives, try some rubber or sticky tack? The low frequency vibration is the beat frequency caused by the slight differences in their vibrational frequencies

Another idea would be to put one in an external enclosure to separate it a bit.

 

[Jacques]

Keeper of the beat huh? I’ll try some foam tape instead of the screws.

 

[Jacques]

Another question - I have a spare 10k 18gb drive that is a bit quieter, Compaq brand but I’m not sure Compaq made scsi drives. One of ICs on the back is Agere Seagate, is there a way to find the original brand / spec of the drive?

…and I remembered - the 146gb Seagate committed suicide by seizing up from heat.

 

[Elf]

I think Compaq and later HP rebranded Seagate drives, as indicated by that chip. Does the model number on the label indicate anything?

 

[Jacques]

Can't find anything about the model number (BD01864552), but I suspect it's a Seagate. Was really only after the access time and bearing type.

 

[Elf]

Hm, another thought is that you could probably use scsicontrol to inquire: https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man1/scsicontrol.1.html

It should provide back some sort of vendor and model data?

 

[Jacques]

So my love hate relationship with scsi drives and the noise continues. I have several quiet IDE drives, is there a way to run an IDE drive in an O2? I’m not after lots of speed, just quiet. I think a scsi2sd might be a bit too slow?

 

[Irinikus]

Maybe it would be a better idea to hook up a heavily dampened external SCSI drive? (This would of course require a heavily customised external enclosure!)

Is there not maybe a way for you to run it diskless? (Over a network?)

 

[Elf]

If you haven't already, it might also be worth trying the newer 300GB 15kRPM drives ( https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/universal-sgi-disk-solution-15krpm-300gb-sca-scsi-drives.128/ ). Despite the spindle speed, I find them to be reasonably quiet; comparable to the quieter desktop IDE drives back when they were still making IDE drives

Given the limited space in the tray I'm not sure you could fit an IDE to SCSI adapter. Those tend to come from the same line of things that also have SATA to SCSI adapters though, so if you were going to get one of those you could go for a 2.5" SATA SSD and adapter which might fit in the tray. Just as a warning, they are pretty expensive unless you have a lucky find!