Hello all,
I have the above mentioned drive and am looking for info on what others have found...or if I am going in the wrong direction.
My drive begins to spin up and then appears to have trouble keeping speed ( i have read other posts concerning this problem and many believe that the Smooth Chip L6284 is to blame...and I have read a great many posts about replacing the chip...without any resolution as to their final conclusion and if or not it was correct)
I read the output of E50-E53 (output of this chip) while attached to the spindle motor and saw that there was a definate drop in voltage as the drive tried to spin up, corresponding with what I thought i was hearing. I also separated the motor from the output of the chip to see if the chip was at fault or the motor was causing the problem.
Unfortunately I do not have an exact donor to compare readings and have been forced to use other drives with a similar chip. It appears that the chip output is fairly consistant without the motor involved. The DC levels were different between the two drives but I attributed that to the difference in drives (age) and the power requirements of the WD Caviar SE 16 drive. The trend, however, seemed to be consistant.
My question ( sorry if too wordy)....has anyone actually figured out the actual cause of failure with this drive?...am I correct to assume that the problem is in the spindle motor, not the Smooth chip?
If it is the spindle motor, is it a bearing issue? I would like to avoid a platter replacement because I am still one of the many who is unable to get WD heads realligned after removing the cover.
Thanks for any insight you can provide.......and for all the other thoughts I get from the Gurus each day

Have you tried disabling all but H0 and/or H1? You'll need PC3000 UDMA for this.

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I do not have the PC3K and cannot disable H0 or H1. I am not sure how that will help my issue...I am interested in your line of thought on this. Can you explain further?

Head failure is much more common than motor failure in these.

Quite often it is just one or two heads that fail, and so by disabling all except 0 and/or 1 (the heads pertaining to the platter with the Service Area on) we can check this.

If the drive ID's OK from head 0/1 then it's pretty sure-fire thing that one of the other heads has failed preventing the drive from calibrating properly (hence the spin up, quiet click and spin down).

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