Cube F.A.Q

Hard drives

Loud hard drives problems on the Cube.

Some Cubes seem to suffer from hard drive problems. Those drives make loud noises. The IBM drives don't seem to make a lot of noise. However Maxtor drive do... One of our readers is encountering such problems with his Cube.. Here is what he says:

"You ask on your Web site for people to contact you if their Cube hard drive is loud. Let me tell you about mine.

The hard drive on my Cube was nearly silent for the first few weeks. I would think that it was off when I walked into the room where I kept it, even when the hard drive was spinning. But now the hard drive makes the same piercing noise as the 5-year old SCSI disks in the PC the Cube was supposed to replace. It irritates me to sit in the same room with the thing. Sometimes I can hear it softly from the other rooms of my 2-bedroom apartment.

I have the 450MHz Cube. The 20GB hard drive inside identifies itself as a 'Maxtor 92049U3' to Linux (I have set up the Cube to dual-boot Linux and MacOS). When I search for that model with google.com, I find the 'DiamondMax 60 20.4GB internal ATA/66 3.5" 5400RPM 9-ms seek time' hard drive. The 'idle mode' sound level is '3.1 bel', according to Maxtor's spec. sheet. Other drives on the Maxtor Web page are 3.3 bel or 35-36dBA. I don't know how these numbers compare with what I'm hearing. =)

Now, I have heard that there are Cubes that ship with an IBM disk, but I do not know if those are 450Mhz/20GB Cubes, also, or 500Mhz/40GB Cubes. I have not decided yet what to do about the noise. If I cannot quickly and inexpensively silence the Cube again, I will probably return it for a refund and buy a cheap PC clone with noise-reducing features.

I am curious what your other readers have had to say about hard drive noise. Feel free to share my e-mail with other readers if you think it will help them.

I am also curious if there is an emerging consensus on what these "mold lines" are. It looks to me like they're hair-line cracks that go all the way through the acrylic outer case, because I see lines on both sides of the case when I shine a flashlight on it. There is a shadow cast, too, by the "mold line," but that is a different line than the two I think I'm seeing on both sides of the acrylic. I think I will remove the case and see what it looks like on the inside. My only worry is that the cracks will lengthen and the case will fall to pieces.

Dave "