Every once in a while, my empeg's hard drive makes a loud noise, as if the bearings that the platters are spinning on aren't spinning as freely as the motor would like, and the motor's having a hard time making a go of it, or maybe that it's gone off balance. I haven't noticed this in the car, but I've usually got the music up and going in the car, so it could easily be happening and I'm just not hearing it there. I've heard similar sounds coming from old SCSI hard drives. I haven't noticed any serial messages spewed out, which I would hope would happen if the drive were generating errors.

Has anyone else heard this sort of thing, and should I be concerned?

When my Mk1's hard disk died, strange noises were my "five-minute warning". Literally. Five minutes after the first noise, the drive ceased operation permanently.

So I'd say make sure you've got your music and config.ini backed up, and written down all your EQ and radio settings...

It's been doing it for a while now. A month or two, I suppose. It seems to be doing it more often these days, though. What was the original warranty period on the empeg? Mine's about 14 months old now. And I would assume that the hard drive is covered under that (probably expired) warranty, right?

Empeg's warranty is 1 year parts and labor. Hard drive == parts, so it would have been covered. Since it's past that time, you're S.O.L.

I'd recomend buying a new HD right now and copying everything across to it...Don't wait. because if you do, you'll lose everything...I know, it happened to my laptop

There's nothing on there I can't easily restore. Plus, I've got no money. Thanks, anyway, though.

I know that one I spent all my money getting my Empeg installed in my car... But do make sure you don't put anything on that drive you're not willing to lose though, and good luck keeping the drive alive until you can replace it.

Occasionally, while running, I occasionally* get a loud TICK, like maybe the hard-drive is parking the heads with a vengeance. Its not continuous, the drive continues to spin normally (that I can hear at least) and have the normal head-moving noises.

No gaps, no errors on serial output.

Is it just parking the heads violently perhaps? I don't hear it regularly tho. Maybe once or twice every couple days, but I could be missing it over the music.

* School of Redundancy school

I get that noise on my empeg and laptop as well. No idea what it's trying to do though.
The empeg has a Fujitsu drive and an IBM drive in the laptop.

- Trevor