Seagate Barracuda, and also other drive brand/types, noise when idle

Because people are bound to come accross this issue, and I haven't found
*any* definitive answer or solution on this issue, I'd like to post my
findings with the following problem on this newsgroup.

Somewhat more than a month back I bought a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus
8MB cache, 120 GB disk. I pretty soon noticed that it started making noises
when idle. These noises sound exactly the same as a SMART-selftest you can
perform with several tools available, Seagate's SeaTools for example. I
didn't like this very much, so I started searching forums and newsgroups,
and post messages of my own. I discovered that this is a new feature that
is implemented on new hard drives, and that not only seagate does it.
Hitachi and perhaps others do this as well. It also shouldn't be confused
with a problem the Barracuda ATA IV had a year or two back, which could be
cured with smscan.exe, a tool seagate provided.

Seagate support wasn't very cooperative, but after a lot of persistent
mailing, I got this response from someone with more knowledge than a
support-engineer, which clarifies a lot. It contains answers to several of
my questions and a description of the algorithm that is causing the noises:

================================================== =
Hello Halfgaar,
The noise you are referring to is what we call off-line seek.

Here are the answers to your questions and a explanation of what the
off-line seek feature does.

Q: Is this feature supposed to be present on all Alpine drives (I
mean, of the same type, for example ST3120026A)?
A: It is present on all Alpine drives.

Q: Do we have a list of the model numbers that have this feature?
A: It is present on all Alpine models.

Q: Is this feature permanent? I have heard that the feature performs
Off-line the first 6-8 hours of it's life, but customers are complaining
that there hard drives have been running in excess of 175 running hours
and yet the seeks are still happening.
A: The feature will run non stop as long as you are in idle and do not
recieve ATA commands.

Q: Can this feature be turned off?
A: No. Only by factory congen. Meaning certain hard drives may have this
feature disabled due to factory code written to the firmware, which may
have been requested by a Seagate proprietary OEM.

Q: Does this problem justify a warranty-claim?
A: I really do not believe so. The off-line scan feature is not a flaw, it
is a useful tool.

Here's the algorithm:

The following algorithm never stops while we are in idle.

T=idle detected
T+ 40 seconds:
READ Activity Follows (~1 minute 10 seconds)
Read 1st 438MB at OD (This special area always gets read repeatedly
each loop pass. OS and other important information here)
Update System sectors (read Reserve Track, Read Temp, Update Health
Log, Update SMART Attributes)
Read 2.3GB starting at last read location (This read picks up where the
last loop pass left off, we keep incrementing by 2.3 GB)
Benefits that we could feature from read activity:
Checking for grown defects. Reallocating defective sectors.
(Performance and reliability benefits)
Monitoring temperature of drive (Reliability benefit)
Update health log and SMART attributes (Reliability benefit)

SEEK Activity Follows- This activity is to randomly reposition the head
over different parts of the media to limit wear issues. (~6 minutes)
Benefits that we could feature from seek activity:
Reliability benefit

Continually loop above activity as long as we are in idle

So as you can see, the off-line scan is a newly implemented feature
that will provide performance and reliability benefits.
================================================== =

This should clarify a lot. The only thing I can't explain, is that some
people have drives that don't make this seek noise when idle. In my forum
posts, I even came across someone who had three identical discs, all bought
at the same retailer I believe, two of which made the noise, one didn't.

I hope this helps others with their problems.

Halfgaar
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