I just bought an old cube to use as a test server (need to buy 5 in total, I thought I'd try one first), perfect little machines. Installed some more RAM and a new HDD, Seagate 7200.9 80GB. All well and good. The whole machine is practically silent except occasionally the HDD (it can't be anything else) makes REALLY loud seek sounds. The first time it scared the hell out of me it was so loud, I it sounded like some threw ball-bearings into a fan! There are some reports of loud seek noise around and SMART says it's fine but is this normal? I can't seem to pin it down to any particular behaviour, it's just every now and then.
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Scary HDD noise
- Thread starter jaguarx
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Hmm... It's probably normal but use Disk Utility on the install discs (or on the boot drive if you have Tiger) to verify the drive. 
Well, I would keep a regular backup of my data just in case, but I was looking at Seagate drives on newegg.com yesterday, and there were quite a number of reviews saying that they had a newer batch that was quite noisy when reading/writing. For the Cube, I believe most people would recommend an older Seagate Barracuda drive if you're going for silent operation.