External Hard Drive Accesses Like Crazy... Even When Not Attached to a Computer!

[Gamma-UT]

Are you sure they are access noises rather than a loud clicking and whirring? If it sounds more like the latter and it's a Lacie, there's a good chances the PSU is going west. The drives often work fine liberated of their old enclosures if the unit does actually appear to die. You could get a new PSU but a bare enclosure and interface is 9/10 times cheaper.

However, some drives are a bit fussy about the USB cable and can make the same head retract/extend noises as when they fail to get reliable connection, even when the drive is powered separately. Is it a long cable? If so, swap it for a much shorter one and see if it still happens. I've got a Seagate external USB that does this.

The 'death rattle' in these cases is quite distinctive so if the noise isn't a relatively slow set of click, click, whirr, click noises, you can rule this piece of remote-control advice out.

I will, however, probably not go near Lacie drives again. They used to be really good but I've had several go bad in recent years - and it's always been the controller or the PSU that failed not the actual drive.

[Jace-BeOS]

Guys, this thing IS a backup! And now that my PC died, leaving me with two bare hard drives, this freaky external LaCie is acting as a data drive till I can host the master in something. In fact both drives on this machine are redundant backups for the main homeless data drive. "Timing is the suck."

As for SMART, does that work through FireWire? I thought that needed to be internal SATA/IDE.