[dexter1]

While compiling stuff on my now fixed O2, i kept hearing this "hiss" noise every 2-3 minutes. I previously proposed it was the R12000 CPU fan with broken bearings, and kept listening if it would deteriorate.

But nope, it's the disk: a 36GB Seagate Cheetah. It crapped out on sunday evening, entering a kernel panic on the XFS filesystem and hanging while trying to dump pages to the crash file.
After a reset the system wouldn't boot because the volume header was missing entirely. This as a matter of fact was exactly the same condition the system was in when i first inspected the machine after i purchased it. So it seemed toi have happened before.

I've now put in a Maxtor Atlas and reinstalled everything and not only is the hissing noise gone, the system is much quieter and runs faster: diskperf now gives excellent throughput numbers for small writes.

I now remember that other cheetah i had in my R5K O2 which on a non-particular day decided to not spin up anymore. Grrrr. I should have XFS dump/restore'd these disks, i know i know....

So for now no more Cheetah's. They are sh*t.

[Jacques]

While compiling stuff on my now fixed O2, i kept hearing this "hiss" noise every 2-3 minutes. I previously proposed it was the R12000 CPU fan with broken bearings, and kept listening if it would deteriorate.

But nope, it's the disk: a 36GB Seagate Cheetah. It crapped out on sunday evening, entering a kernel panic on the XFS filesystem and hanging while trying to dump pages to the crash file.
After a reset the system wouldn't boot because the volume header was missing entirely. This as a matter of fact was exactly the same condition the system was in when i first inspected the machine after i purchased it. So it seemed toi have happened before.

I've now put in a Maxtor Atlas and reinstalled everything and not only is the hissing noise gone, the system is much quieter and runs faster: diskperf now gives excellent throughput numbers for small writes.

I now remember that other cheetah i had in my R5K O2 which on a non-particular day decided to not spin up anymore. Grrrr. I should have XFS dump/restore'd these disks, i know i know....

So for now no more Cheetah's. They are sh*t.

I had two die in my O2, both 72gig versions. One made a very loud whine noise, then just died and ground to a halt with a beautiful scraping sound, the other exhibited the same hiss as yours then wouldn't start one day! So far my best drives have been Fujitsus and a HP drive I cannot tell the manufacturer of.

I still have one cheetah in my drawer, it's not being used!

[jan-jaap]

So for now no more Cheetah's. They are sh*t.

The older Cheetahs you typically find in SGI systems are noisy buggers, but IMHO not less reliable than e.g. IBM or Maxtor.

The newer Cheetahs with FD bearings (15K.3 and newer, and the 10K.7 series IIRC) are nice though. Quiet like the average SATA disk, with only somewhat more aggressive seeking noises. I like them a lot. Never lost one either.

[Trippynet]

Hmm, the only drive I've had recently that died was a Cheetah in my O2 when I dug it out of storage a few years back. Thankfully it was the option drive and didn't contain anything important.

One thing I will say is that the Seagate range of SATA Barracuda drives from around 2013 are absolute garbage (model ST3000DM001). I acquired a whole bunch a bit back from some scrapped workstations at work and had 4 of them in my main PC (plus some spares). They were fine for a while, but over the last year I've had no fewer than FIVE that have crapped out. Thankfully they each contain scripted clones of each other (backup purposes) so I've not lost anything, but I'm in the process of scrapping the lot and replacing them with some WDs I've bought.