Noisy RAID card?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-14 06:28pm

I've just finished migrating my server to some better hardware, and this morning the RAID card has become very noisy. Judging by the channel lights it's one side of it (or one of my drives) that causes this noise. Taking each drive out, I can't hear any abnormal sounds from the drives, and have no data problems at the moment. The raid card itself seems to make a quite loud noise (audible over several computers, with the case closed and a noisy GPU fan) when one of the channels is used.

Do RAID cards make noise when they're dying? I was planning on replacing the current setup with SATA drives and thus ditch the RAID card, but if it has problems and may damage my data I'll replace the drives as soon as possible.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2007-03-14 06:37pm

Do raid cards have moving parts..?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-14 06:54pm

Not that I know of, but they may have timing crystals. I've checked the drives themselves, but *they* aren't noisy when their respective channel light comes on: the RAID card itself is. I've accelerated Operation Replace Drives, but I'm curious what could cause the card to make this kind of noise. The HDDs are currently in 5 1/4" heatsinks, which make it very easy to check for vibration, and they're at the other end of the case to the RAID card. Damn card cost me thirty bucks anyway, it's a piece of shit, but I needed it to use large drives on the old PII board. When I move the data onto the new drives, I'll switch them to the onboard IDE channels to avoid problems.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2007-03-15 12:25am

The only times I've seen solid state electronics (with no speaker, obviously) make noise were in cases where somehow a short had been created and there was electrical arcing. Even then, not easy to hear.

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2007-03-15 05:15am

Dieing capactiors can "whine".
It's like a very high pitch sqeel, you can't hear it at first, but as it gets worse it gets lower pitch. Even when you can't hear it, it can give you headaches etc.

Is the card sqeeling? or is it more of a mechanical sound?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-03-15 05:26am

Resinence wrote:Dieing capactiors can "whine".
It's like a very high pitch sqeel, you can't hear it at first, but as it gets worse it gets lower pitch. Even when you can't hear it, it can give you headaches etc.

Is the card sqeeling? or is it more of a mechanical sound?

Yeah, it was a high-pitched electrical noise, in time with the channel 1 activity light. I've replaced the drives with larger SATA ones. Sadly I can't get Mandriva to forget about the hardware, so my system has an unused RAID card and two worthless drives attached to it.