slow/whisteling harddisk

arri

Registered
hi

my laptop (pb G4 550Mhz) suffers from a strange problem that occurs for instance when copying large amounts of data form/to my laptop, but also sometimes when just playing a movie.

what happens is that when copying large amounts of data, the harddisk starts to make a whisteling sound, and the transfer datarate drops from the 'normal' 10 Mb/s to less than 2 Mb/s.
when playing a movie (e.g. divx) the whisteling sound is ofcourse very annoying, but often the movie playback starts to stutter.

i recently completely re-formatted the harddisk and freshly installed tiger. this didn't change anything to the situation.

what is wrong?
any suggetsions are welcome

thanks
arri
 
Yep. It is sign of the hard drive's hard drive getting into bad blocks and is becoming worn out. It might be time to think about getting another internal hard drive.
 
yeah, i was afraid it would be something like that, but i read some articles where was said that when reformatting a harddrive badblocks are located and marked so that they will not be used anymore.

but maybe it's too many bad blocks already..
it's an old machine, i know.. and it's been working hard for a long time.

i tell my employer to provide me with a new machine... :)
 
It doesn't sound like bad blocks to me, it sounds more like the bearings for the platters are going bad -- hence the whistling or whining sound and the slowdown. Still, it's a major hard drive problem and is on par with bad blocks in terms of damage.

If your employer pays for the repairs, no worries! ;)
 
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