Good ole' reliable S.M.A.R.T., eh? While the noise is happening, use a cutip to stop each fan by pressing on it in the center (not the blades) until the fan stops. When it stops, an the noise doesn't you've ruled out that fan. Don't forget video cards. It the noise is mostly high pitch, higher than human voice, then it's probably a hard drive. Which one?

Save all your work, and close as many programs as you can. This is not to prevent data loss, but to reduce disk usage which can interfere with this test.

As root, or via sudo, issue: "/sbin/hdparm -C /dev/<drive>" for each drive on your system (hda, hdb, sda, sdb). Note this is for the drive not the partitions. This will show you the power state of each drive, which should come back looking like:

[bcrook@Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc: drive state is: active/idle

This means that sdc, in my case, is spinning. You can stop the drive from spinning by putting it in standby or sleep mode. To do this, issue: "sudo /sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdX; sudo /sbin/hdparm -Y /dev/sdX". hdparm's -y and -Y switches put a block device in standby or sleep mode. Not all devices or drive controllers will support both. On my computer, -Y does nothing. But -y noticeably spins the disk down.

[bcrook@Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc: issuing standby command [bcrook@Zero x86_64]$ sudo /sbin/hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc: drive state is: standby

If you spin down /dev/sdc and the noise stops, then you've found the problem. Make sure your backups stay current, and start budgeting for your replacement. For those of you that want to save the life of your drives, or save electricity you might even schedule (via crontab) all of your hard drives to go to standby an hour after you go to work. This might raise the question of how you get them spinning again. Don't worry about that, the first time you go to access the disk after sleeping or suspending it, linux will wake it right up for you, and you'll only have to wait a couple seconds. Hope this helps find the culprit of that noise. You might also look in to running the smartutils short, long, and conveyance tests if you haven't already. Badblocks in readonly mode, and "e2fsck -f" (after unmounting the fs of course) is also not a bad idea if you want to give the disk a good checkup.

On Nov 19, 2007 10:43 PM, Philip Dorr [email protected] wrote:

also make sure all the drives a properly screwed down

On Nov 19, 2007 10:42 PM, James R. Sissel [email protected] wrote:

...

10 words: Unplug them one at a time until the noise stops.

At 10:34 PM 11/19/2007 -0600, you wrote:

...

one word: stethoscope.

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On Nov 19, 2007 10:43 PM, Philip Dorr [email protected] wrote:

also make sure all the drives a properly screwed down

And check and clean the fans too. I've seen several fans get very noisy when either dirty or when aged enough to lose oil.

Jon.