Hitachi 500gb irregular vibration problem

[flat]

Hello all,

About a year ago I purchased a 500gb Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 drive and it's been very quiet and fine until about a month ago when it started to develop an on/off vibration (a low level "elliptical" humming that vibrates the case and is very unnerving - it feels like a wobbly bicycle wheel turning slowly). Then the drive developped an additional problem: the motor revs up and down very loudly at cold boot time, in a jerky sort of way, after the system's been inactive for a few hours, and only settles to normal after a few minutes (could be related to fairly cold temperature in the room).

I tried to tighten the drive in the case but the irregular vibration is still very ennoying. The drive is full of data with about 25-15gb of free space and it's been like this for a year. Max temp at any time 42C.

Attached are results from latest HDDScan tests (SMART and VERIFY). Previously I've run hitachi ftool and it didn't report any problems.

Should I try to RMA it?

Attachments

Verify-blocks-address.txt

(15.55 KiB) Downloaded 562 times

[harddrivespecialist]

Copy your data and use a new drive.

[drc]

Should I try to RMA it?

Yes

[BlackST]

Worn bearing. Failure is 'imminent'. Rma.

[flat]

Thanks to all for replying.

I was wrong attributing the revving up at boot time to the disk - it was the giant cooling fan in the front of the case.

However, the irregular vibration is definitely coming from this one disk.

Worn bearing. Failure is 'imminent'. Rma.

Is it still worn bearing and very bad?

[BlackST]

Need to see the drive.

[Zorb]

Is it still?

It won't get any better, in fact, it will get worse faster and faster. Bearing wear causes vibration, vibration kills bearing, and on and on it goes.

[drc]

If you have any question at all about your drive's integrity, it is time to get a new one.

[Zorb]

There is no "still", once problematic always problematic. An intermittent problem that goes away will return at the most inopportune time.

[flat]

OK, thanks again for all the replies. I've contacted hitachi support, they told me to run their DTF tool. It looks like this is their way of determining if a drive is failed and can be replaced under RMA.

Somehow I have a feeling that the tool won't discover any problems, it's something with the drive's motor and not the surface of the disk. I guess if they refuse to RMA then I'll just suspend the damn drive in the cd bay so it doesn't touch the casing.

I've never done RMA on a hard disk before so i don't know how this is supposed to go.

[drc]

You could always use MHDD's "makebad" feature.

[flat]

You could always use MHDD's "makebad" feature.

As a last resort maybe. I guess it's undocumented, how do i do it?

[Zorb]

RTFM

[drc]

type it and see what happens?