30 Dec
2004
30 Dec
'04
4:25 p.m.
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:
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
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.